The nation’s No. 3 reverse mortgage lender, Longbridge Monetary, is accusing market chief Mutual of Omaha Mortgage of dishonest advertising and marketing practices.
In response to a criticism filed by Longbridge, its competitor is allegedly utilizing quite a few web sites with faux evaluations as a way to prop up its reverse mortgage enterprise, equating to unfair enterprise conduct.
The New Jersey-based reverse mortgage lender needs to place a cease to Mutual’s alleged ways, a swimsuit filed in a California federal courtroom on Sept. 27 stated.
Particularly, Longbridge claims Mutual of Omaha makes use of deceptive web sites —ReviewCounsel.org, AdvisoryInstitute.org, and RFSQualify.com—to control senior shoppers into selecting its providers or Retirement Funding Options.
The above-mentioned web sites, which current themselves as unbiased assessment platforms, are literally run by Mutual and “inflate Mutual’s scores and misrepresent it and Retirement Funding Options (RFS) as separate entities, regardless of their shared possession,” the criticism stated. Longbridge refers to a submitting with the California Secretary of State, which reveals that Evaluation Counsel is owned and operated by Mutual.
Longbridge additionally claims the opposite web sites talked about are both instantly or not directly managed by Mutual of Omaha and that the training articles on the Evaluation Counsel web site are authored by a director of promoting at Mutual of Omaha Mortgage, “additional proving that Mutual is pulling the strings of the Evaluation Counsel web site.”
“[Review Counsel] publishes false and deceptive “scores” of reverse mortgage suppliers that rating Mutual of Omaha far larger than its rivals primarily based on factual misrepresentations and extremely skewed ranking standards,” Longbridge purports in its swimsuit. “As well as, the Evaluation Counsel web site presents seniors with a false alternative between two successful options within the rankings—particularly, Mutual of Omaha and RFS (Retirement Funding Options) — making these corporations seem like rivals within the rankings (and {the marketplace} extra usually), versus what they are surely: one and the identical firm.”
Each Longbridge and Mutual of Omaha declined to touch upon the pending litigation Monday. In response to the Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System, RFS is a commerce identify for Mutual of Omaha.
The submitting argues that these misleading promoting practices not solely hurt susceptible seniors but additionally unfairly impacts rivals, similar to Longbridge, who adhere to moral promoting practices.
Mutual is accused of violating quite a few state and federal statutes together with the Actual Property Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), Federal Commerce Fee steerage and the Lanham Act, which prohibits the use in commerce of any “false or deceptive description of reality.
Longbridge is in search of injunctive reduction underneath California’s Unfair Competitors Legislation (UCL) to cease Mutual from utilizing the deceptive web sites.
With out such a movement, Mutual will “proceed to focus on aged shoppers with the false, misleading, and deceptive promoting contained on these web sites” and can additional hurt Longbridge’s repute and enterprise,” the authorized submitting states.
By means of August in fiscal yr 2024, Mutual of Omaha has 4,024 Residence Fairness Conversion Mortgage endorsements from the Division of Housing and City Improvement, placing it forward of Finance of America at 4,002 and Longbridge at 2,004, in accordance with Reverse Market Perception.
Mutual of Omaha entered the reverse mortgage enterprise by way of the 2018 acquisition of Synergy One Lending. In 2020, Synergy One administration repurchased the model in addition to the distributed retail ahead manufacturing channel.
Concurrently, Mutual can also be being requested to cough up $145,000 in sanctions by Waterstone Mortgage in a commerce secrets and techniques case.
Waterstone, in a movement filed Sept. 27 in a Florida federal courtroom, claims Mutual has brought about it to incur hundreds in charges “by figuring out 186 alleged commerce secrets and techniques after which altering course and alleging fully new commerce secrets and techniques eight months after the shut of discovery.”
