The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency [1] (OCC) has released its latest OCC Mortgage Metrics Report [2], covering mortgage performance data up through Q1 2018. The report “collects data on first-lien residential mortgage loans serviced by seven national banks with large mortgage-servicing portfolios.” As of the end of 2018’s first quarter, 95.6 percent of mortgages were current and performing, holding steady year-over-year.
The seven banks tracked by the OCC serviced approximately “17.8 million first-lien mortgage loans with $3.30 trillion in unpaid principal balances,” per the report. This total represents around 33 percent of all outstanding residential mortgage debt within the United States.
The report states that servicers initiated 37,300 new foreclosures during Q1, up 8.1 percent over Q4 2017. However, that number is actually down 21.5 percent year-over-year. Home forfeiture actions during Q1—including completed foreclosure sales [3], short sales [4], and deed-in-lieu-of-foreclosure actions—were down 32.5 percent year-over-year, hitting a total of 19,360 actions.
Servicers also completed 23,427 mortgage modifications during Q1, an increase of 7.1 percent over Q4 2017’s total of 21,866 such actions. Of those, 20,604 (87.9 percent) were so-called “combination modifications,” which the OCC report defines as “modifications that included multiple actions affecting affordability and sustainability of the loan, such as an interest rate reduction and a term extension.” Within this subset of combo modifications, “94.5 percent included capitalization of delinquent interest and fees, 63.0 percent included an interest rate reduction or freeze, 94.6 percent included a term extension, 1.8 percent included principal reduction, and 13.9 percent included principal deferral,” according to the report.
Of the remaining 2,823 modifications, 2,763 of them received only a single modification action. The 60 that were left were not assigned a modification type, according to the report. Pre-modification monthly payments were reduced in 78.5 percent of the modifications for the quarter.
To read the OCC’s full Mortgage Metrics Report for Q1 2018, click here [5].