Tag Archives: HAFA

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Department of Treasury have announced enhancements to the government's Making Home Affordable (MHA) program to assist homeowners who are struggling to make monthly mortgage payments.

As of September, more than 1.2 million homeowners have received a permanent modification through the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). Homeowners currently in permanent HAMP mods have been granted an estimated $12.1 billion in reduced principal, Treasury reports. In fact, officials say of all non-GSE loans eligible for principal reduction entering HAMP in September, 72 percent included a principal reduction feature.

The housing industry is making ""important progress across many key indicators,"" according to the Obama Administration's latest housing scorecard, but as usual, the administration continued to warn the ""overall recovery remains fragile."" In the March report, the administration highlighted data showing improvements in home prices. In conjunction with the scorecard, the administration also released its progress report on the Making Home Affordable Program.

Short sales are quickly becoming a popular alternative to foreclosure, even outpacing REO sales in certain states, according to data from RealtyTrac. While short sales have become a more common home forfeiture solution, an individual in California has been working on a program to turn short sales into a solution for homeowners who want to remain in their home, but as renters instead of owners.

The government's Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) continues to add borrowers to its roster each month, but the pace has slowed. Data released Friday by Treasury and HUD shows the number of permanent HAMP mods granted during the month of March was down 10 percent from the month before and down 45 percent from March 2011. While HAMP activity has slowed, other government-assisted foreclosure alternatives in the form of short sales and deeds-in-lieu have held fairly steady.

Bank of America is making changes to its short sale procedures and introducing an improved task flow within the short sale technology module from Equator, BofA's short sale management platform of choice. The goal: to reduce the timeframe for a short sale decision to less than three weeks. Starting Saturday, April 14, real estate professionals working with BofA will be required to submit five documents for short sales initiated with an offer, and they will be able to complete tasks such as document collection, valuations, and underwriting at the same time.

Servicers for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have completed almost 2 million foreclosure prevention actions for the two companies since they went into conservatorship in 2008, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency's (FHFA) third-quarter report released Wednesday. More than half of these actions have been loan modifications, and of the remainder, about 676,500 have kept homeowners in their homes. About 269,700 were short sales or deeds-in-lieu of foreclosure.

The U.S. Treasury said Wednesday that it will continue to withhold incentives from JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America for modifications, short sales, and deeds-in-lieu completed through government programs. JPMorgan is the only servicer participating in Treasury's Making Home Affordable program that was determined to need ""substantial improvement"" in complying with program guidelines during the third quarter. Bank of America moved up a notch on the assessment scorecard to needing only ""moderate improvement.""

Treasury has released a new progress report on its Making Home Affordable initiative, covering all the ""H"" acronyms. Since the program started in April 2009, 857,000 homeowners have received permanent loan restructurings under HAMP, and 894,000 have refinanced their mortgages through HARP. HAFA transactions tally just under 19,000. Officials say they continue to see a fall in mortgage defaults due in part to foreclosure prevention programs reaching more borrowers upstream in the process, but there's ""much more work to do.""

Treasury has released the results of its second-quarter assessment of servicers participating in the Making Home Affordable program. Officials say they will continue to withhold program incentives owed to Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. The two were determined to need ""substantial improvement"" in key areas including borrower evaluations. BofA and JPMorgan received the same score last quarter, as did Wells Fargo, but Wells has now elevated its grade to needing ""moderate improvement.""