Inspectors photographed the guard gate and left. The fees? They kept coming
Three Florida homeowners are suing mortgage servicer Shellpoint over repeated charges for property inspections that were never actually completed.
The case, filed on March 12, 2026, in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, targets NewRez, LLC, which operates as Shellpoint Mortgage Servicing. At its core, the dispute raises a question that should give every servicing shop pause: what happens when your inspection vendor keeps billing for a job they cannot do?
According to the court filing, Norma E. Hendy, Courtney Copeland, and Brandon Ingram own a home at 17149 SW 49th Place in Miramar, Florida. The property sits inside a gated community. That detail turns out to be central to the entire case.
The loan dates back to May 2007, when Hendy and her now deceased husband originally took out a mortgage with Countrywide Home Loans. The loan eventually landed with NewRez as servicer. While the homeowners were working through a loan modification, they brought in an attorney to look into fees that had been tacked onto a reinstatement quote. Their counsel sent a formal request for information to Shellpoint on August 20, 2025.
What came back, the filing alleges, was revealing. Shellpoint's September 2025 response showed a string of property inspection charges stretching back to 2017, totaling roughly $490. Each entry carried a telling note: the inspector could not get past the gated community. In some cases, the inspector simply photographed the guard gate and left. Yet the charges kept coming — year after year, vendor after vendor.
The homeowners followed up with a formal notice of error on January 12, 2026, giving the servicer a chance to fix the issue. Shellpoint responded the following month but, according to the filing, did not reverse or address the disputed charges. Under federal servicing rules, charging a borrower for a service that was never meaningfully performed — or that a servicer has no reasonable basis to charge — qualifies as a servicing error.
The homeowners are now seeking damages, correction of the alleged errors, and attorney's fees under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. The case is in its earliest stage, and no court has made any determination on the merits.
The dollar amount here is small, but the operational lesson is not. Property inspection programs at most servicing operations run on autopilot — orders go out, vendors drive by, invoices come in, and fees get posted to borrower accounts. When that cycle runs without meaningful oversight, it can quietly create regulatory exposure that sits unnoticed in a loan file for years, exactly the kind of liability that surfaces only when someone finally pulls the thread.
For servicers managing large portfolios, the takeaway is straightforward: if your vendor cannot complete the job, the charge probably should not be on the borrower's ledger.
