Trying to Hold Onto Home
Metropolitan Money Store Put Their House at Risk, Md. Couple Say

By Ovetta Wiggins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 10, 2007

The dining room table is draped with a blue plastic tablecloth, left over from an 11-year-old's birthday party a few days earlier.

George and Jacqueline Prunty's son wanted a sleepover, but his parents said no. Facing eviction because their house has gone through foreclosure and been sold at auction, they have banned all sleepovers.

"I'd hate to have all his friends over and there be a knock on the door with someone saying, 'You have to be out,' " George Prunty said.

The Pruntys, like millions of people nationwide, took advantage of a hot real estate market to borrow on the equity in their house. Now, entangled in what investigators call one of the largest mortgage scams in Maryland history, they risk losing the split-level brick home in Fort Washington they've owned for eight years.

All they had wanted to do was fix the roof, replace the front door and some windows, and pay off bills.

Instead, family time is stretched thin: Only one parent goes to their sons' baseball and football games in case the eviction notice comes while they're gone. And finances are tight: The family no longer eats out and saves money for an uncertain future. "We're under a lot of stress in the household that was never there," George Prunty said.

The spike in foreclosures across the Washington region and the nation has done more than disrupt corporate lending and damage financial institutions. It has left thousands of people hopeless, questioning day to day whether they will have a roof over their heads.

Maryland's foreclosure ranking jumped from 40th in the nation last year to 18th in June, state officials said. Prince George's County has the highest percentage of homes in foreclosure in the state, and Fort Washington is one of the hardest-hit communities in the Washington region.

With a booming real-estate market doubling the value of his house, Prunty decided last year to do what many homeowners did: refinance.

While he was getting money for the repairs, Prunty decided last October that he would pull out additional cash to pay off bills, including credit cards and back payments to the Internal Revenue Service that were dragging his wife's credit score down.

The Pruntys purchased the three-bedroom house in February 1999 for $146,000. It was their first home. With their combined $60,000 salary at the time, they got a 30-year fixed rate loan with a 7 percent interest rate.

George Prunty, a boiler operator, and his wife, Jacqueline, a clerk for a federal agency, were glad to get out of an apartment. They saw it as no place to raise their family. Wanting to escape Mississippi Avenue in the District, he headed to where many African Americans have moved in search of a better life: Prince George's.

In Fort Washington, his two boys could throw a football in the yard without his worrying about their safety. They could run around and bounce on the trampoline he placed beside the house.

Yes, life in the suburbs would be better, he thought. But, even before the move to Fort Washington, there were signs of financial troubles. The couple had a new baby, and Jacqueline Prunty suffers from a chronic illness, leaving hospital and doctors' bills. "When you're trying to pay a hospital bill, it makes you late on another bill," George Prunty said.

Within a year of buying the new home, the couple filed for bankruptcy. Under Chapter 13 bankruptcy, individuals are allowed to pay their debt over time. By filing, homeowners can stop foreclosure proceedings but must make subsequent mortgage payments on time. The repayment schedule for other bills can last up to five years.

By last year, the Pruntys had completed the repayment schedule and wanted to pay off some remaining debt, as well as make home repairs. With an appraisal showing the value of their house had more than doubled to $340,000, they decided to pull out some equity.

They ended up on the doorstep of Lanham-based Metropolitan Money Store Corp., a foreclosure rescue company that offered financing help to homeowners with credit problems.

Jacqueline Prunty, 51, said she heard about Metropolitan on nearly every radio station she listened to. The company advertised on gospel and R&B stations, promising to help homeowners like her with cash flow and credit problems. She was sold when she saw a spot on the Black Entertainment cable television station.

"Now I want to go down to BET and say, 'Do you know what you're putting out to our people?' " George Prunty said in a recent interview.

"What really hurts me more than anything else is that it's black-owned," Jacqueline Prunty said of Metropolitan as she sat at a dining room filled with knickknacks and family photos. "Why would they want to do this to their own people like this? It really hurts."

George Prunty said Metropolitan's owner, Joy Jackson, added "insult to injury" by spending nearly $800,000 on her elaborate June 2006 wedding at the Mayflower Hotel, which lawyers say was probably paid for, in part, with money from her business.

"It's a messed-up situation. . . . I want my two boys to have a stable home," he said.

Jackson and Metropolitan are the subject of a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of homeowners, including the Pruntys, who have collectively lost as much as $60 million in home equity. The company is also being investigated by the several federal agencies for possible fraud.

The lawsuit alleges that instead of helping homeowners, Metropolitan enlisted investors or straw buyers with good credit to buy the houses and borrow as much as possible against the home value, siphoning the equity.

Jackson, whose business has since closed, did not respond to requests for comment. Efforts to locate her have been unsuccessful.

Jacqueline Prunty said her intuition should have told her something wasn't right when she saw the flashy cars outside the company's office. The couple met with Jackson, whom they described as a smooth fast-talker.

A month behind on their $1,100 mortgage payment, they were told to skip the next couple to get into a credit repair program. "That was their catch, telling us, 'We have this covered,' " George recalled.

The Pruntys said they took Metropolitan's advice and stopped paying the mortgage. Within a couple of months, a letter arrived in the mail from their lender that said the house was in foreclosure.

"We weren't even in a foreclosure when we went" to Metropolitan, George said. "We were coming in for a refinance."

Metropolitan then told the Pruntys that they could get into a program that would help them keep their home and add at least 100 points to their credit scores, which were in the low 600s -- low enough to make it difficult to obtain loans at good interest rates or rent an apartment.

While they were in the credit-repair program, Metropolitan said it would work on the foreclosure by getting someone to invest in their property, George recalled.

He said he felt like he didn't have anywhere else to turn, so he agreed to Metropolitan's proposal. When it came to signing the deal, Jacqueline said there were so many papers on the table she didn't know what she was signing.

The couple said they didn't realize that they were signing over the deed of their home to the investor. Nor did they know they were signing away more than $100,000 in equity.

The straw buyer hasn't made any mortgage payments on the Pruntys' house, they said. And now, said the Pruntys' attorney, Phillip Robinson, the house has been foreclosed on and was recently sold to a bank at auction.

"They could be kicked out any day," Robinson said. "We've asked the judge to hold off until this other case [the class-action suit] is handled."

Robinson said he has been working on a case-by-case basis to keep his clients from being evicted. He has asked Maryland's attorney general to order that no one involved in the lawsuit be evicted while the case is pending.

Meanwhile, the Pruntys are setting aside money and looking for places to store furniture and belongings. George Prunty said he sometimes peers out his window and finds cars driving slowly by his house. Some take pictures.

"We're in a holding pattern," he said. "We were told to start saving money because we don't know what tomorrow is going to bring."

They've also been told, he said, that someone should always be at the house; otherwise it could be seen as "voluntary abandonment."

"We used to go out to my son's baseball and football games. Now one of us is always here," he said. "It used to be a family thing."

"You can't get mad," Jacqueline said. "It's a lot of people going through it. If we were the only ones, then we would be mad."

But anger is a waste of her energy, she said. And at this point, she doesn't even have the energy to take the birthday tablecloth off her table. She said she'll get to it.

Right now, she's more worried about coming home and finding a "pink slip" on her front door.