LenderOffender.com - CNN News Transcript
Several of you have asked for the repost of the CNN Saturday Morning News featuring LenderOffender.com. Please see below for the entire transcript unedited. To see the entire video, please click here.
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OK. So foreclosed properties, becoming neighborhood eye sores. You know, you can imagine, people don’t live there anymore, things go awry. Well one man got so mad about it, they took matters into his own hands.
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ANNOUNCER: This is CNN, watched by more Americans than other news channel. Now back to CNN SATURDAY MORNING.
NGUYEN: It’s not just the people whose homes are foreclosed on who suffer. Empty homes can become eye sores and property values they will drop. It made one homeowner really mad and he did something about it. CNN’s Ted Rowlands has his story.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
TED ROWLANDS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The people living next door to Mark McKinzie moved out almost two years ago. Now weeds are actually growing out of the garage.
MARK MCKINZIE, LENDEROFFENDER.COM: I said, well what can I do? Well I can create something that might call attention to the problem and give frustrated residents a voice out here.
ROWLANDS: Last month McKinzie created lenderoffender.com, a website where anywhere in the country can post for free information about neglected foreclosed property. For each entry there’s a photo, a few comments and the name of the lender or bank that owns the home. When a property is cleaned looked up, McKinzie takes it off the site.
He says this house down the street has been vacant for months.
MCKINZIE: Look at the lawn. That is a black dead lawn. So no one in this neighborhood deserves to live next to this property and homeowners in this area neighborhood deserve to know who owns this property.
ROWLANDS: Citibank owns this house. They told CNN it became vacant in late November and is now in escrow. As for the lawn, they said “we did not sod the lawn because it moved in the market very quickly.”
One lender, Wells Fargo actually cleaned up their properties listed on the website. In a statement to CNN, they said in part, they are “very concerned with preserving the condition of homes and neighborhoods and added they’ll keep watching the website.”
Delores Conway, a professor at the University of Southern California specializing in real estate says and lenderoffender.com may push others to act. DELORES CONWAY, UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA: It may help to nudge the lender along a little bit in terms of coming out and putting in the proper maintenance to the property.
ROWLANDS: McKinzie is hoping she’s right, especially when it comes to the house next door.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
NGUYEN: Mark McKinzie says he invites anyone living near poorly maintained foreclosed homes to take a few photos and add them to his site. Ultimately he hopes the problem will be cleaned up so the site won’t be needed any more.