Mortgage Debt Services was founded in the late 1980′s as “Mortgage Workouts”. The founder and CEO, Blaise Coco, was a Massachusetts realtor who had bought up several multi-family homes in the area in an effort to generate a monthly positive cash flow.
In 1986, the real estate market took a turn for the worse (much worse), and Mr. Coco found himself with a stack of mortgages which added up to $1.6 million on properties that had devalued to $600,000. He was $1 million in the hole (or upside down as we often say). His problem was made worse when rents dropped as new buyers bought adjoining properties at discounted prices and his rental income tumbled.
He worked harder and harder in the real estate business, trying to make enough money to cover all the mortgages but it was never enough. After weeks of sleepless nights he finally walked into the offices of one of his lenders and offered them the keys to one of his properties, and explained his situation. To his surprise the banker said, “Well maybe we can work something out.”
He came to realize that the bank didn’t want his property – they were holding on to enough foreclosed real estate. They were willing to either restructure the loan or allow him to sell the property at it’s current value and forgive the remaining debt on his mortgage. He was shocked.
He then visited each of the lenders that held his mortgages and was able to achieve a ”workout” for each of his properties. He immediately realized that there were a lot of other people, many of them single family home owners who were in the same position. This is when and how Mortgage Workouts was born. He started representing home owners with their lenders and collecting a fee from the lender to negotiate mortgage workouts with the lender.
In the 1990′s the real estate market turned around, and the need to do mortgage workouts subsided. It is at this point that Mr. Coco founded Eastpointe Mortgage to broker mortgages for people who wanted to buy a home.
Now that the market has turned again, Eastpointe Mortgage continues to broker mortgages and and Mortgage Workouts has been renamed Mortgage Debt Services.