The Obama Administration’s foreclosure mitigation programs continue to provide relief for millions of homeowners in the housing recovery.
As a result, the Making Home Affordable Program has assisted more than 1.5 million distressed borrowers since its inception in 2009, the Obama Administration said in its February Housing Scorecard report.
HOPE Now lenders alone offered families and individuals more than 3.4 million proprietary mortgage modifications from the program’s beginnings through December 2012.
The Home Affordable Refinance Program also grew, continuing to offer homeowners affordable and sustainable relief to avoid foreclosure.
As of January, more than 1.1 million homeowners received a permanent modification through Home Affordable Modification Program, saving $546 on their monthly mortgage payments, and an estimated $17.9 billion altogether, the report noted.
Homeowners currently in permanent HAMP modifications were granted about $9.2 billion in total principal reduction. Of all non-agency loans eligible for principal reduction entering HAMP in January, 69% received a principal writedown.
The Federal Housing Administration has offered more than 1.6 million in loss mitigation and early delinquency interventions since the launch of HAMP.
In January, more than 105,000 second-lien modifications were completed through the Second Lien Modification Program. Additionally, more than 114,000 homeowners exited their homes through a short sale or deed-in-lieu of foreclosure with the assistance of the government’s Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives Program.
The 15 metropolitan areas with the highest HAMP activity included Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, Cali.; Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, Fla.; and Phoenix-Mesa-Glendale, AZ.
Since the inception of the government’s Making Home Affordable Programs, the Treasury has required participating servicers to take specific actions to improve their processes through ongoing reviews.
For the fourth quarter of 2012, two servicers were cited as needing to make minor improvements to their processes, while seven other servicers were found as in need of ‘moderate improvement.’
Servicers are focusing attention on areas identified in previous program reviews and are demonstrating improvement in program implementation in the follow areas: calculating homeowner income and evaluating homeowners under program eligibility criteria of the “second look disagree” category, according to the report.
The top three servicers for January were Bank of America (BAC), CitiMortgage (C)and GMAC Mortgage (GMA).
