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Housing group gets desperate calls from homeowners
Newsday wrote last week about a private-nonprofit team trying to buy and modify toxic, Long Island mortgages to pre-empt foreclosures, and the calls – 50-plus a day -- streamed in to the team.
Nassau-based developer James Vilardi, heading a band of investors with up to $10 million for the project, and the Long Island Housing Partnership have been contacting lenders and firms contracted by the federal government to buy non-performing loans. But no one has voiced serious interest.
That’s not changed much, but last week, the Partnership got at least 50 calls a day of a different nature, said Peter Elkowitz, the nonprofit’s chief executive officer.
“The phone calls are from people who are in need,” said the chief executive, whose nonprofit, like other local housing advocates, has been helping homeowners avoid foreclosures for free.
Elkowitz said colleagues from other nonprofits and the Nassau County Bar Association, which runs a monthly anti-foreclosure clinic, have also been calling to ask how they can help.
Still, the private-nonprofit venture has taken a tiny step forward.
Vilardi, based in Valley Stream, said he talked for the first time Thursday to the head of a Manhattan-based real estate investment firm about connecting him to companies contracted by the federal government to buy toxic debt from Wall Street. That comes three months after Vilardi wrote the firm’s head a letter about his venture.
“I said ‘Are you willing to sit down?’ “ the developer recalled Friday afternoon. “He was in the middle of something or whatever . . . and he said ‘I promise to give you a call tomorrow,’ which is today.”
Homeowners have also contacted Vilardi for advice, but he referred them to the Partnership because he’s not an attorney: “Any time I talk to a homeowner that’s in trouble, I’m willing to do what I can for them, but I always say, ‘Don’t do anything, sign anything or talk to anybody, unless you have an attorney or an accountant that you can get independent advice from.’ “
Out there, as Vilardi and Elkowitz know, it’s a drama in which troubled borrowers must fight off home rescue scams and a cliffhanger in which they wait for action from lenders and servicers.
The calls from troubled borrowers show the desperation that’s out there. Said Vilardi, “They don’t know me from a hole in the wall, and they want to take advice from me.”
Tags: foreclosures , Long Island Housing Partnership , Nassau County Bar Association
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