| Topics and Issues | "Junk Fees" (4) |
In July 2024, the Community Home Lenders of America (CHLA) submitted a letter to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Rohit Chopra. This was reported in a HousingWire story. According to the story,
The letter cites three specific practices that it hopes the Bureau will focus on, which it and its members believe “are abusive, anti-consumer, and potentially illegal.” The first is a concern that mortgage brokers are making trigger lead solicitations, which is troubling to the organization since they “do not have the mortgage banking capability of closing a loan.”
Since there is a legal requirement saying that trigger lead solicitations must be a “firm offer of credit,” CHLA said, it does not “see how it is possible for a mortgage broker to meet the ‘firm offer of credit’ requirement in such situations.”
Secondly, CHLA says that its members have been made aware of “junk call trigger lead solicitations that either misrepresent or falsely imply that they are calling on behalf of the existing mortgage lender that the borrower is currently working with,” the letter said. “This is unethical, anti-consumer, and potentially illegal.”
Finally, members believe that in some cases, individual loan officers are making trigger lead calls without the consent of the company they work for, which is “problematic,” the letter said.
That’s because the employing lender “is not able to properly supervise language and practices used by such loan originators,” CHLA said.