Tag Archives: Foreclosure Alternatives

Also in 2014, FHFA and the GSEs reviewed and made enhancements to requirements for foreclosure alternatives, forbearance plans, and rate-reset notifications. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac announced in July the expansion of home retention solutions for Standard and Streamlined modifications, enabling eligible borrowers with mark-to-market LTV ratios below 80 percent to obtain a loan modification.

Aside from the event scheduled for Chicago on May 27, HOPE NOW has announced borrower outreach events for St. Louis (June 13) and Cleveland (July 11) as part of an effort to focus on the Midwest. HOPE NOW said it plans to host events later in the year in Ft. Lauderdale, Hartford, Memphis, and Los Angeles.

Today, Freddie Mac receives about one tenth of the amount of calls it was receiving during the immediate aftermath of the housing crash (about 40,000 per month, or 1,300 per day), but many homeowners facing financial setbacks are still calling Freddie Mac hoping the GSE will have a solution for them, whether it allows them to keep their home or is of the non-home retention variety.

The industry provided 147,000 non-foreclosure solutions for distressed homeowners in February compared to 28,000 completed foreclosures for the month, a ratio of more than five to one, according to HOPE NOW.

Since HUD began SFLS in 2010, it has resolved 38,385 out of 79,029 non-performing loans through various means, a total of 49 percent. Out of those resolved loans, 16,706 of the borrowers (21 percent of the non-performing total and 43.5 percent of the resolved loans) avoided foreclosure through either paying the loans current, forbearance agreements, paying the loan in full, a short sale, a third-party sale, or a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure.

Recent actions by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) indicate that the Agency is placing an increased emphasis on the clearing out of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's seriously delinquent loan portfolios and steering more borrowers toward foreclosure prevention and loss mitigation actions, using foreclosure only as an absolute last resort.

Approximately 1.88 million homeowners nationwide received a mortgage solution in the form of a loan modification, short sale, deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, or other workout plan during 2014, according to data released Wednesday by HOPE NOW. The 2014 numbers brought the total number of solutions the industry has offered to homeowners since 2007, when HOPE NOW began tracking the data, up to 23.2 million, representing a combination of both long and short term tools.

Freddie Mac has helped nearly 1.1 million struggling homeowners either retain their homes or otherwise avoid foreclosure through a variety of means since the beginning of 2009, four months after the FHFA conservatorship began, according to the GSE's 2014 Financial Results Summary released on Thursday.