Complaint Review: America's Servicing Company

We are senior citizens who bought a condo in Gulfport, MS condo for our impending retirement. Unfortunately, it was mostly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Our insurance didn't cover flooding, which accounted for most of the damage. We used our life savings--$50,000--plus took out a $30,000 SBA loan to repair the condo to perfect condition. We kept up the payments while it was unliveable, then while it was listed for sale starting in 2007. But property values had gone down on the Gulf Coast, and we were upside down in the loan. By then, we had already retired somewhere else. 

In November 2008, our realtor got a short-sale offer that would have paid all but $1,100 of Wells Fargo's first mortgage, plus $3,000 to the SBA. We would not get anything.

SBA agreed right away. ASC told us to stop making the payments while they considered the offer. During that time they lost the paperwork and it had to be resubmitted from scratch. Most of the time, our calls to ASC were never returned. If we got through, each time it was a different rep who was not familiar with our account.

Finally, after four months of stalling, ASC turned down the short sale because they said the offer of $90,000 was too low. They had also racked up $8,000 in fees during the months they told us not to make the payments. A few weeks later, we found out from our realtor that on April 19, 2008 ASC foreclosed on the condo and put it up for auction.

Ironically, the buyer was Wells Fargo--ASC's parent company. They purchased it for $70,000. 

In all, we lost our beautiful condo, a $25,000 downpayment, $50,000 in savings and two years of making $1,000-a-month payments. Not only that, but we had to declare bankruptcy to prevent the SBA from garnishing our Social Security checks. After being victimized by a hurricane, ASC and Wells Fargo have totally destroyed us financially.