JPMorgan Chase & Co. in the "next couple of weeks" will resume filing paperwork on 127,000 foreclosures it has suspended due to documentation errors, said Charlie Scharf, chief executive of the New York company's retail bank.
It would take "three or four months to get all of these documents" refiled because it has to reprocess affidavits and other legal documents in 40 states, Scharf said in a presentation at the BancAnalysts Association of Boston Conference.
JPMorgan Chase said last month that it had stopped foreclosures on 115,000 loans — 12,000 few than it disclosed Thursday — after court papers showed that employees at some large banks had signed off on foreclosure documents without verifying them for accuracy. The scandal prompted attorneys general in every state to launch probes into foreclosure practices.
Scharf said JPMorgan Chase's foreclosures were "based on materially accurate information," even though some documents weren't notarized right or vetted for accuracy by the people losing their homes.
"We do have issues," Scharf said, but he said those issues have been distorted by the "amount of lies" and "misconceptions out there."
Among the top ideas he sought to dispel: That JPMorgan is too aggressive seizing homes from people that don't deserve it.
The average mortgage it seizes hasn't been paid in more than 14 months. In Florida, its seized mortgages are overdue by 22 months, and by 26 months in New York, he said. Half the homes it takes back are either vacant or occupied by a renter, he said.
"Foreclosing isn't good for us. We don't want to foreclose on people. …Unfortunately there are people that just don't want to stay in their homes or can't afford to stay in their homes," he said.
Separately, Scharf said that so far this year it has received requests for files on $8.14 billion in outstanding loans that it may have to repurchase from investors or the government housing agencies. It had $9.25 billion in file inquiries, and $3 billion in buyback demands, in 2009.
In a separate presentation, Bank of America Corp. CEO Brian Moynihan said the Charlotte banking company had received buyback requests on $18 billion of the $1.22 trillion loans it originated between 2004 and 2008. He said the company believes that buyback requests have peaked.
He said Bank of America will resubmit paper work "as necessary" on 102,000 foreclosures it halted in October to as part of the document error scandal.
