A bill aimed at making it more difficult for people like
to victimize vulnerable mortgage borrowers passed the state Senate yesterday and is headed to Gov. Schwarzenegger.
(which passed the Assembly on Monday) would give the Department of Real Estate the power to ban unscrupulous individuals from working in real estate or related industries for up to three years.
Osborn, whose crimes were detailed in a two-part series (
) in the Register this week, was ordered by the DRE in 2004 to desist and refrain from arranging mortgage loans without a real estate license. Nevertheless, Osborn was able to get hired by several Orange County mortgage companies before being jailed last year. Currently, the DRE doesn’t have authority to enforce its own orders.
According to the bill’s sponsor, state Sen. Michael Machado, D-Linden, the bill would also “prohibit a real estate broker from sabotaging a short sale in order to get the property listing when the property is up for foreclosure sale, and requires a real estate broker who brokers a mortgage, and helps facilitate a property sale as part of the same transaction, to notify everyone involved in that transaction about all of the roles the broker is performing.”
“What we’re trying to do is increase the level of accountability and the risk to the person doing business that way,” Machado
earlier. “It’s not going to be foolproof, but it does close some loopholes.”
