Marketing Firm Identifies Loan Modification Opportunities For Attorneys, Others

A recent MarketWatch article describes one company's marketing activities designed to drum up loan modification business for its clients:

• Your lender refuses to grant relief from your costly mortgage, and you're desperate. Should you respond to any of the growing number of television ads, mailings or phone calls touting loan modifications? The marketers producing the ads represent a broad mix of firms seeking business, including mortgage and real-estate brokers and lawyers.

• One ad running on several television stations highlights the "crisis on Main Street" and offers a loan modification "help line." JCR Enterprises Inc., a Foothill Ranch, Calif., marketing company, produces the infomercial. JCR receives income from licensing the ad and from commissions paid by the stations on which it airs. Licensees get the phone calls.(1)

• David Riemann, senior vice president for JCR, says he has about 50 loan-modification licensees, mostly attorneys. To handle a loan modification, those attorneys charge consumers fees ranging anywhere from $995 to $5,000.

Source: Double whammy (Can't pay your mortgage? Some modification offers hurt more than help).

Go here and go here for other posts on issues relating to attorneys, loan modifications, professional ethics issues, and the unlicensed/unauthorized practice of law.

(1) The story refected above is a revision of a story originally published March 2. The revised story notes that it clarifies the manner in which JCR Enterprises is compensated as was described in the original. The manner of compensation, as reflected in the original March 2 version of the story, was described as follows:

• David Riemann, senior vice president, says that consumers who respond are typically referred to a participating attorney in their area. His company may collect a retainer for processing and handling the call. Plus, JCR gets paid commissions for media and production.

I suspect that someone realized that the state bar associations might have had a serious problem with attorneys participating in the arrangement as originally described, thus the backpedalling.