Mortgage servicers delivered 108,000 loan modifications and short sales in January, according to Hope Now.
The Hope Now organization, which aligns the efforts of servicers, investors, insurers and nonprofit counselors to save troubled homeowners, noted that member servicers finalized 6.15 million loan modifications over the course of the past six years.
The rescue-solutions delivered to distressed borrowers came from proprietary programs developed inside financial firms, as well as the government’s own Home Affordable Modification Program.
In January 2013 alone, servicers delivered 78,397 loan modifications and 29,244 short sales, Hope Now said. Nearly 64,000 of those loan mods were proprietary – or completed through financial firms’ internal programs, while the remaining 14,858 went through HAMP.
Since 2007, five million homeowners have received proprietary loan mods, while another 1.15 million went through HAMP during that period.
A total of 1.18 million short sales have been delivered to distressed borrowers since Hope Now began recording this data back in December 2009.
Of the loan mods completed in January, 88%, or 55,698, were proprietary mods with fixed-interest rates of five years or more, Hope Now said.
Proprietary loan mods that included reduced principal and monthly interest-payments reductions accounted for 85%, or 54,113, of the modified loans. Meanwhile, loan mods completed by financial firms with reduced principal and interest payments of more than 10% accounted for 76% of completed mods.
Foreclosure sales in January fell 23% from a year earlier, with only 60,412 foreclosure sales completed in January, Hope Now said.
Foreclosure starts also fell 30%, reaching 140,482 starts in January, down from 200,447 a year earlier.
