Sommers v. Abraham Lincoln Federal Savings & Loan Ass'n

66 F.R.D. 581, 20 Fed. R. Serv. 2d 386, 1975 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13196
District Court, E.D. Pennsylvania·Decided March 25, 1975·No. Civ. A. No. 72-2269·Published·Cited by 40 cases

Opinion

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER

NEWCOMER, District Judge.

The present suit was originally brought by five mortgagor couples on behalf of themselves and all others similarly situated against 172 mortgage-writing institutions located in this District. Plaintiffs’ claims arise from these institutions’ alleged practice of requiring mortgagors to prepay monthly into escrow accounts with defendants a sum equal to one-twelfth their annual expected property tax, mortgage insurance premiums, assessments, and water and sewer rentals. Under this practice, called “escrowing”, the mortgagee institutions do not pay the mortgagors any interest on the prepaid amounts, which the mortgagees remain free to commingle with other funds and to invest. Plaintiffs complain that “sometime in the nineteen-sixties” defendants conspired to switch from the “capitalization” method of prepayment,1 under which the principal owed by the mortgagor would be reduced by an amount equivalent to each month’s prepayment, to the non-interest paying escrowing method, and that this conspiracy unreasonably restrains trade in violation of the Sherman Act, Section 1.2 Plaintiffs also claim a “tie-in” between the mortgage and the escrow prepayment requirement, also in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Plaintiffs, now numbering over eighty individuals, seek certification as representatives of a class of all those persons who hold mortgages with the defendants and who prepay taxes, premiums, assessments, or rentals into escrow accounts with defendants. Plaintiffs also seek to certify [585] defendants as representatives of a class of lending institutions who escrow such prepayments. Defendants vigorously oppose both certifications. For the reasons discussed below, we decline to certify defendants as class representatives, and we create two subclasses of mortgagors from the class proposed by plaintiffs, each subclass to be represented under Federal Rule 23(b)(3) by those named plaintiffs whose claims are typical of those of the subclass.

I. DISCUSSION

i. Plaintiffs’ Claims.

This section will provide a slightly more detailed outline of plaintiffs’ claims than does the paragraph above. The remaining original3 plaintiffs, as well as the intervening plaintiffs, are mortgagors of many, but not all, of the defendant lending institutions. They allege that their mortgage agreements with defendants require them to prepay property taxes, mortgage insurance premiums, assessments, and sewer and water rentals into escrow accounts on which they are paid no interest. They allege that defendants invest and earn interest on these escrow funds. Plaintiffs do not challenge the legitimacy of the mortgagees’ concern that funds are available to meet these liabilities as they come due, since non-payment could result in a lien on the mortgaged property with a higher priority than the mortgagees’ lien. Rather, plaintiffs contend that during the nineteen-sixties defendants conspired among themselves and other unnamed institutions to switch from a method whereby the principal owed on the mortgage is reduced to equal the amount of the prepayments (and increased by the same amount when the liabilities are ultimately paid) to the escrow method, whereby the principal is unaffected and the prepayments are held in non-interest paying accounts. Plaintiffs contend that this conspiracy achieved the virtual elimination of the capitalization method as an alternative to the escrow method, thus reducing competition between lending institutions in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Plaintiffs also contend that defendants condition their mortgage loans on the mortgagor’s acquiescence in the escrow method, constituting an illegal tying arrangement under Section 1 of the Sherman Act. Plaintiffs’ complaint also challenged the escrow method as violating various other federal and state laws, but these claims were dismissed by this Court.4 The only claims presently involved are plaintiffs’ Sherman Act claims.

ii. Facts Elicited by Discovery on Class Action Motions.

The parties have been engaged in discovery on the class action motions for approximately the past year. Plaintiffs have addressed numerous interrogatories to defendants’ prepayment requirements. The answers to these interrogatories show sharply divergent practices among the defendants with regard to mortgagor prepayments. The first variation appears between mortgage loans which are insured by government agencies (e. g., Federal Housing Administration, Veterans Administration) and those which are not. Most defendants require escrowing for at least tax and insurance liabilities on all government insured [586] mortgages. However, this uniformity of escrowing disappears when defendants’ conventional (i. e., non-government-insured) mortgages are examined. As for escrows for taxes, 35 defendants5 require tax escrows in connection with all conventional loans, 32 require tax escrows for some but not all conventional loans, and 15 defendants never require tax escrows in connection with conventional loans. (Three named defendants do not escrow at all). As for insurance premiums, 19 of the defendants never escrow for these charges; 15 never escrow in case of conventional loans; 8 require such escrows in the case of all conventional loans; 30 require insurance escrow in connection with some but not all conventional loans; and 10 accept but do not require escrow payments in connection with conventional loans.

Seventy-three of the defendants do not escrow for assessments; 65 do not escrow for water charges, while 61 do not escrow for sewer rents.

The variations do not end there. The responses to plaintiffs’ interrogatories demonstrate that the defendants who require escrows on less than all loans apply different criteria in making their decisions. Many have no numerical criteria for the application of escrow requirements. Within this group, practices vary from those who appear to base their decision primarily on the amount of the mortgagor’s equity in the property, to those who seem to place emphasis on the financial strength of the borrower, to those who weigh the availability of other security, to those who assess “all relevant factors”.

iii. Class Action Issues. Prerequisites of 28(a).

Before the named plaintiffs can be certified as class representatives under either 23(b) (2)' or (b) (3) they must satisfy all the prerequisites of 23(a) (1-4). Plaintiffs must show that the class is “so numerous that joinder of all members is impractical” (a)(1); that “there are questions of law or fact common to the class” (a) (2); that their claims are “typical of the claims or defenses of the class” (a) (3); and that they “will fairly and adequately protect the interests of the class” (a)(4). Plaintiffs bear the burden of proving that they satisfy each of those prerequisites.

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Sommers v. Abraham Lincoln Federal Savings & Loan Ass'n, 66 F.R.D. 581, 20 Fed. R. Serv. 2d 386, 1975 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13196 (E.D. Pa. 1975).

66 F.R.D. 581 (Sommers v. Abraham Lincoln Federal Savings & Loan Ass'n) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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