Tales from the maze

If you read my story today about the Martinelli's of Lawrence and their efforts to renegotiate their loan and save their home from foreclosure, you might get an understanding of how complex mortgage financing is today. I certainly did.

It's hard for me to imagine how hard it is for homeowners, because I started with two advantages:I make my living finding the right people and I work for the Boston Globe, which has some juice with companies. I also had an entry point through public relations departments. Still, trying to figure out who exactly makes the decisions on loans made me dizzy. For example, I was looking at a data base of foreclosed properties in Lawrence, thanks to the Warren Group , noticed a unlikely owner of homes in that city: German financial services giant Deutsche Bank. I called Deutsche's press shop, where I was told that Deutsche had nothing to do with foreclosures. It's the trustee for investors who hold mortgage-backed securities, meaning it stores the mortgages, receives money from companies that services the loan, and distributes that money to investors. It took me at least three phone calls to figure this out, including one long conversation with the guys at Deutsche Bank's trust operation.

Decisions about foreclosures and foreclosure sales, the Deutsche guys said, are made by the servicing companies, the firms that send bills to homeowners, collect the payments and send the dough, minus fees, off to the trustee.

So I called one of the servicers for Deutsche Bank, HomEq of Sacramento, Calif. Several phone messages and days later, HomEq told me what they do is pretty much spelled out in their contracts with trustees. But if I wanted to buy a foreclosed property that that they are servings, I could check their website and call the local real estate agent handling the sale. The realtor, of course, told me it's HomEq's decision on whether to accept an offer. I didn't get a chance to call HomEq again. But why do I think I would have ended up where I started?