Loss Mitigation

Freddie Mac announced Tuesday that beginning in January 2011, the company will begin disclosing pool-level delinquency data on a monthly basis for all single-family Freddie Mac Participation Certificate (PC) and Giant PC securities. Freddie Mac says providing this delinquency disclosure data at the pool level will make the company's delinquency disclosures consistent with an industry practice previously established by Ginnie Mae.

Since the development of the Hardest Hit Fund in February, the state of Oregon has received more than $200 million to help homeowners struggling with their mortgages and to develop foreclosure prevention measures. This Friday the state will open its first foreclosure prevention program. The application for the Mortgage Payment Assistance (MPA) program will be available on the recently launched OHSI Web site from December 10 to January 14, 2011.

The North Carolina Housing Finance Agency's new Foreclosure Prevention Fund is now available statewide through participating HUD-approved counseling agencies. Financed by the Department of Treasury's Hardest Hit Fund, the federal grant money will be used to financially assist homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages due to job loss or other temporary hardships. The agency expects the program to enable 21,000 North Carolina residents to keep their homes.

Americans continue to grapple with uncertainty about the housing market, with 58 percent of U.S. adults expecting recovery to be at least another two years away. Rick Sharga of RealtyTrac and Pete Flint of Trulia are of the same mind as consumers. They peg the housing recovery to begin taking shape between 2013 and 2014. The robo-signing debacle has left most consumers mired in distrust of banks and the government. The industry experts say its effect on REO sales will be minimal, but the impact on consumer confidence could be especially damaging.

Wingspan Portfolio Advisors, a specialty and component mortgage servicer focusing on highly delinquent loans, recently started using the loss mitigation module from technology developer IndiSoft's RxOffice platform. IndiSoft says Wingspan will use the system to help borrowers avoid foreclosure through either repayment alternatives or short sales to maximize the value of severely delinquent loans for investors.

The Terranova Group has launched a program to purchase troubled assets from the portfolios of community banks while raising capital to support the banks' stability and recovery. After conducting an analysis of a bank's REO portfolio and nonperforming assets, Terranova will advise and execute a disposition strategy in which the troubled assets are acquired from the bank's portfolio.

CoreLogic Credco recently introduced FinalCheck, an automated, fully ""decisionable"" suite of prefunding risk evaluation products that instantly verify credit, application, and fraud data in an easy-to-read report for lenders. The company says FinalCheck is designed to help lenders satisfy GSE requirements, reduce repurchase risk, and increase loan delivery confidence.

The Homeownership Preservation Foundation (HPF) has reported a 14.2 percent decrease in calls to its Homeowners' HOPE Hotline during the month of October. The hotline provides free homeownership education and foreclosure prevention counseling. The organization says it is seeing fluctuations in call volume, often related to the number of foreclosures, which decreased during the month. The state with the most calls coming into the hotline was California.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have seen a steady falloff in the rate of loans 90 or more days overdue since early this year, but their latest figures show the rate continuing to head down for one, up for the other. Both GSEs have dialed up the pressure lately for big banks to buy back bad loans. But the lenders themselves are doing their own dialing up, only it's in the form of stronger resistance to repurchase requests. The two mortgage giants are planning to implement new lending guidelines and fee structures for riskier loans.

Clayton Holdings now offers loan administration and asset management services to investors in small balance commercial real estate loans via its Quantum Servicing unit. Quantum's commercial servicing division will primarily handle non-performing commercial loans - including acquisition, development, and construction (ADC); multi-family; and shopping center assets - valued at $5 million or less. Clayton says the division is already servicing approximately 6,000 small balance loans.