Home hazard: Mainers vulnerable to high loan rates

AUGUSTA – With their high rate of home ownership, Mainers are prime targets of predatory lenders, those who take advantage of customers who are marginal credit risks.

A report released Monday in the State House also says the state’s laws are insufficient to protect residents from abusive lending terms.

Coastal Enterprises Inc.’s report looks at abuses in subprime lending, the market for people whose income, debt or poor credit rating means they don’t qualify for standard home loans.

Coastal Enterprises, a community development corporation based in Wiscasset, says that in 2000, Mainers lost more than $23 million in home equity to predatory lenders. Because Maine’s subprime lending market has grown sharply since then, the amount lost to predatory lending has probably increased also, the report says.

It also says Maine has a high rate of home ownership, and home values have increased during the past decade. The rising prices mean homeowners have accumulated a lot of equity. Many of those homeowners become victimized by predatory lenders.

Leah Pyy is one of those borrowers. Pyy said she took out a second mortgage on her Bath home six years ago to draw on some of the equity in her home to pay off credit-card debt and help get her family’s finances in order.

She didn’t realize at the time that the terms of the loan – $31,500 for 20 years at 13.75 percent interest, plus closing costs that amounted to 15 percent of the total loan – weren’t going to provide much relief.

“I wasn’t really paying attention to it, I was so submerged in debt,” Pyy said. “We just signed out of desperation, and I think that’s what they prey on.”

Maine has joined other states in taking legal action against some companies engaged in predatory tactics. In settlements that followed, none of the companies admitted wrongdoing, but they agreed to amend their practices and paid fines totaling nearly $780 million.