Loss Mitigation

Last November, the board of commissioners of Cook County, Illinois, agreed to include a $3 million amendment in the county's budget in order to create a mortgage foreclosure mediation program. The program, which applies to Cook County residential properties that are owner-occupied, single family homes or individual condominium units and owner-occupied residential properties with four units or less, officially launched on Monday.

With refinancing in the commercial real estate (CRE) sector hard to come by and delinquencies continuing to rise, special servicers of commercial mortgages are dealing with large influxes of new troubled loans. Primary and master servicers ranked by Standard & Poor's reported that delinquent CRE loans hit a new all-time high at the end of 2009. A separate study by the research firm Delta Associates says that the aggregate value of distressed commercial real estate in the U.S. has now surpassed $187 billion.

West Palm Beach, Florida-based Ocwen Loan Servicing, a provider of residential and commercial loan servicing, special servicing, and asset management services, announced Friday that it has seen marked success in its fight against foreclosure after just three months of using MKDirect, a MortgageKeeper Referral Services product that connects homeowners to high-quality nonprofit government services.

Despite servicers' efforts to modify unprecedented volumes of troubled mortgages and a large-scale government-led program put in place to stem the nation's viral foreclosure epidemic, they haven't been enough to keep up with the rapid pace of loan deterioration, according to new data from Lender Processing Services (LPS). An LPS market report released Monday shows that the total number of delinquent loans as of the end of February was 21 percent higher than it was a year earlier, and the foreclosure rate represents a 51 percent year-over-year increase.

According to Bank of America's monthly Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) progress report to the Department of Treasury, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank has completed nearly 33,000 permanent HAMP modifications, including more than 12,000 since the previous monthly report. As of April 8, 2010, 32,900 Bank of America customers had been placed into completed mortgage modifications with affordable payments under HAMP, up from 20,666 reported a month earlier. This marked the bank's most productive month to date.

The administration's Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives (HAFA) program was officially implemented on Monday, but many real estate professionals still have questions about the logistics of this new initiative. In an effort to answer these questions and provide Realtors with the latest HAFA information, Springboard Nonprofit Consumer Credit Management, a HUD-approved housing counseling agency headquartered in Riverside, California, has launched an online HAFA resource center.

Retreat Capital Management Group, a Lake Forest, California-based provider of loss mitigation and portfolio management products for the mortgage industry, announced Thursday that it has deployed AnswerMine Group's analytic software to power its predictive modeling services for mortgage lenders and servicers.

A new poll by market research firm Harris Interactive found that 24 percent of people with mortgages believe they owe more on the loan than their homes are worth. The U.S. Treasury recently announced changes to its foreclosure prevention program to include mortgage relief for underwater borrowers, but some worry the help may be too little too late since it will likely be fall before this assistance is available. Harris says nearly half of the borrowers who believe they are underwater are already having difficulty making their payments.

HOPE LoanPort, a new tool developed by HOPE NOW that streamlines loan modification applications on behalf of borrowers facing foreclosure, announced today that Consumer Credit Counseling Service of Greater Atlanta (CCCS Atlanta), with 30 offices in four states, will join the more than 100 counseling agencies already committed to the Web portal.

In a 7-1 vote, the California Senate Banking, Finance, and Insurance Committee approved a measure that would better protect homeowners in the Golden State who are at risk of foreclosure. SB 1275: Homeowners Bill of Rights contains two major provisions. It would require all mortgage servicers doing business in the state to evaluate delinquent borrowers for a modification before proceeding with foreclosure, and if a servicer fails to do so, it would give the homeowner the right to bring an action to either void the foreclosure or recoup damages.