MURRIETA - Families renting houses from a group of hard-to-find investors are wondering who owns the roofs over their heads, where they should send their monthly rent checks and whether a series of foreclosures will force them to move in the next few weeks.

The families, at least a dozen of them, are living in houses that out-of-town investors bought with 100 percent financing between May 2006 and May 2007. The Californian has identified 70 houses in western Riverside County tied to Elias Ochoa, who ran the Corona branch of a mortgage brokerage until earlier June.

Ochoa and his clients borrowed a total of $39 million, and have defaulted on 40 of the 70 mortgages since April. Lenders recorded defaults on at least six houses in August, setting them up to be seized and sold by banks by late November.

In interviews last week, residents said their experiences in the houses had been bizarre from the beginning, when they responded to handmade "for rent" signs in the windows of the houses. Most said they didn't balk at first, but default notices and a series of strangers knocking at their doors this summer have set them on edge.

Of a dozen renters who spoke to The Californian, all said they had never met or spoken with the people whom Riverside County records identify as the landlords. Several said they had been writing checks to Solco Financial Services, Ochoa's mortgage brokerage, and then to a company called ABC Mortgage, Realty & Property Management, which shared Solco's office suite in Corona.

Ochoa hasn't responded to calls or e-mail messages left for him over the past two weeks. The Californian was able to locate only one of the 33 investors, Lisa Tomsha of Irvine, who didn't return calls seeking comment.

One investor who was typical for the group bought three Murrieta-area houses through Ochoa last year, according to a database used by local real estate agents. All three involved 100 percent financing, and the owner defaulted on all three this summer, according to foreclosureradar.com, a database of defaulted and bank-owned properties.

A couple living in one of the three houses said a man claiming to be the owner had called but refused to give out his own phone number or meet with them. The wife said she had called Ochoa's Corona office and left messages six times in May, asking where she should send a rent check.

Over the summer, a couple of weeks after the lender began to foreclose on the house, Ochoa dropped by in a Mercedes to pick up the rent check, but she refused to continue paying when Ochoa asked her to make out the monthly check to him personally, she said.

"I would really love to know who owns this house," said the woman, who asked that her name and address not be used for fear of retribution. Ochoa insisted that he himself owned the house, she said.

Several of the families who rented through Solco and ABC said the companies' representatives had made it surprisingly easy to move in. Renters in two of the houses said Paul Chenelia, who worked under Ochoa at Solco and then ABC, was lax in taking deposits and noting Social Security numbers for credit checks.

"We moved in," one woman said, "and that's when all hell broke loose."

Chenelia was one of two Ochoa employees who also appear to have bought investment houses through him. Chenelia and his wife, Cindy, bought two Murrieta houses in 2006 with 100 percent financing; they sold the two houses six months later - for a total gain of $194,000 - to other Ochoa clients, who also used 100 percent financing, according to tax records.

Chenelia wrote in an e-mail to The Californian that he had severed all ties with Solco, ABC and Ochoa, but didn't respond to specific questions or to a request for an interview.

Michael Soliz, who continues to own and operate Solco out of the Pasadena area, said Ochoa's Corona operation had been autonomous and that he was surprised when told of Ochoa's dealings in Riverside County.

Of the 70 houses identified by The Californian, Ochoa acted as the buyers' agent in 58 cases, according to the real estate database. Searches of title documents show that the same investors bought at least another 12 local houses in similar arrangements around the same time. In several cases, a house would sit empty for months, all while Ochoa arranged sales from one of his clients to another.

Murrieta real estate agent Bonnie Butterworth said ABC and Solco had apparently moved renters out of at least two of the houses and into other houses the company was managing. Butterworth, who specializes in selling defaulted houses to investors, said she first noticed the houses last month, when she began to see default notices and then began to knock on doors. Public records show that individual borrowers had bought several houses around the same time with 100 percent financing and then defaulted just a few months later, a fact that led Butterworth to suspect that they were linked.

"These people destroyed our property values," Butterworth said. "It's not just the unsuspecting homeowners. It's not just the unsuspecting tenants. It's affected every single person in this city."

- Contact staff writer Chris Bagley at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2615, or cbagley@californian.com.

See also:

Real estate group guts neighborhoods (Aug. 26, 2007)