Eagle Star reposession shortfall claim, help us please

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We received a letter out of the blue from Eagle Star in Feb 2000 claiming a £19637.33 shortfall on a flat we had repossessed in 1995. This letter knocked us for six as we had started a new life & had bought another property & had a good credit file. We adopted a naive honest approach to Lucy Nicholson who made phone calls & wrote the initial letters to us, she gave the impression that they knew how it affected people so they would make it as painless as possible & that we were not to worry as we would only have to pay a percentage of the 19k & a figure of 20% was mentioned by herself, she required that we fill in income & expenditure form with back-up documents/bills etc to substantiate our expenses & return them to Eagle Star with an offer of a monthly payment which we made of £50 per month which would be reviewed every six months to see if our cicumstances changed. This was all subject to the condition that we signed a charging order on our new house which we baulked at & to this day we still have not signed the charging order & it was at this stage we woke up & went in search of advice, we hired a solicitor who we dont think he is very clued up on home repossessions. We also discovered this web site which has been the most help to us & comforting when we were receiving all sorts of nasty threats, thank you. We now know that we should have handled the whole episode differently, but we do feel we were deceived/lied to by Eagle Star & since the solicitor came on the scene the aggressive nasty phone calls to home & work have ceased. The situation now is that i have been paying them £50 per month by DD for 8 months (our solicitor has told me to reduce this or stop it completely)we have not signed the charging order under the advice of our solicitor although ES keep pestering us to. We have received the shortfall statement from ES which has some slightly high/inflated costs from various people, we feel its not very detailed, it's just a printout by themselves. The biggest problem we feel is that our flat was undersold by themselves. We bought the flat in 86 paying 21.5k.....they sold it in 96 for 22k. We think this is where our main argument lays & is going to be the basis of our case against them. They also claimed that the flat was in a poor location in a block that was vandalised, we feel that although it was'nt Mayfair the critisizms were unfair, all the flats were privately owned & we lived there for 10 years quite happily with only the odd incident consistent with a built up area. The flat was in postcode me2 Strood, Kent. Well thats the story so far can anyone point me forward in how i go about things from here?

1)How can i find out what the flats value was in 96? 2)Are there any things i should or should'nt say or do? 3)Should i ask for a more detailed breakdown of their claim? 4)What else can i do to better my case?.......please!

-- Keith Langley (kb.langley@virgin.net), May 14, 2001

Answers

From the figures you set out above, there was a £500 gross surplus achieved on the sale of the property (save for costs incurred), and that assumes it was an interest only mortgage (was it ?)

Personally, I would be fascinated, as I am sure others would who regularly visit this site, to know how a £500 surplus becomes minus nearly £20,000 (twenty grand)?

Have Eagle Star provided you with this essential information ? Please also inform us who your lender was.

Personally I wouldn't pay them anything further until they provide the information to prove the debt is genuinely due - to your satisfaction !

Stand your ground !

-- Vic Harper (victorcharper@aol.com), May 14, 2001.


Hmm. If you haven't mistyped your figures it sounds like you've been ripped off by the surveyors and other 'professionals' whose services would have been needed to sell the property. Well, item one of the good news is that whoever sells it can only claim reasonable fees - for example a selling agent would charge maybe 1.5-2.0% - so any excess on these can be queried and reduced. Viz the massive shortfall they are claiming, they will claim most of it is interest on whatever fees they laid out in order to sell. The good news here (item 2) is that they can't claim any interest on the principals they expended unless they submitted a bill at the time, giving you an opportunity to pay those fees immediately. [consider, for example, if I were to send you 10 CDs, but no bill, then in a years time sent you a bill for the 10 CDs plus £100 in interest because you hadn't paid... same principle applies].

Just on what you've said, there are demonstrably a number of issues you can take up with them, and we've barely scratched the surface.

Final comments is that it was very kind of them to offer to let you off with £50 per month (an open ended commitment) plus a charge over your new property. How generous! The bastards. One very good reason why you should stop paying is that a court may see your payments as an acknowledgement/acceptance of the debt.

-- Andy T (andy.turner@ramesys.com), May 15, 2001.


I have had some 5 replies in 24 hours after this posting & its been good news, some good info to help me compile my letters. The actual lender was Maes finance, i'm not exactly sure then what Eagle Stars exact role is, also to keep things straight, i had a top up loan on the mortgage which took it to 29k. We thank you all for your responses which have made the picture clearer than 2 hours in the solicitors office.

-- Keith Langley (kb.langley@virgin.net), May 15, 2001.

Keith, did you know that Maes are a subsidiary of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce(CIBC) who,s mortgage book was bought out by Abbey National in 1994. Eagle Star are their Indemnity Insurers.

-- jacky jones (jones5@btinternet.com), May 16, 2001.

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