The Obama Administration’s foreclosure mitigation programs continue to benefit millions of homeowners as the housing market gains momentum.
The Making Home Affordable Program has assisted more than 1.6 million homeowners since its inception in 2009, the Obama Administration said in its May Scorecard report. That figure is up from the last score report.
Homeowners continue to benefit from deep payment relief, helping them sustain their mortgage payments overtime, the report added.
As of April, nearly 1.2 million homeowners received a permanent modification through the Home Affordable Modification Program, saving homeowners $547 on their mortgage payments each month – an estimated $19.7 billion to date.
As a result, HAMP modifications continue to exhibit lower delinquency and re-default rates than industry modifications, the report explained.
“We have kept the pressure on the mortgage industry to step up its efforts, which has helped millions of families access relief in a historic housing crisis,” said Tim Massad, Treasury Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability.
He added, “Making Home Affordable provides standards and accountability for the mortgage industry that will now help additional homeowners avoid foreclosure through 2015.”
The Federal Housing Administration has offered more than 1.8 million loss mitigation and early delinquency interventions since the launch of HAMP.
Meanwhile, HOPE Now lenders offered homeowners more than 3.6 million propriety modifications through April.
Homeowners currently in permanent HAMP modifications were granted about $10.2 billion in principal reduction. Of all non-agency loans eligible for principal reduction entering HAMP in April, 67% received a principal writedown.
In April, more than 111,000 second-lien modifications were completed through the Second Loan Modification Program. Additionally, 154,000 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.; New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA; Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, Fla.; and Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI.
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.
The quarterly Servicer Assessments summarize performance and found that servicers are more effectively evaluating homeowners under program eligibility criteria.
According to the “second look disagree” category, the average rate for top servicers was below 1%.
Additionally, mortgage servicers continue to accurately calculate homeowner income, which is critical in determining a homeowner’s eligibility and modified payment amount under the program.
Thus, the majority of servicers have income calculation error rates below the established benchmark – with two servicers at 0% error rates.
The top three servicers for April were Bank of America ($50.83 0%), CitiMortgage ($50.83 0%) and GMAC Mortgage ($25.22 0.07%)
