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The nation's two largest mortgage companies saw the number of actions carried out to prevent foreclosures on their loans more than double in 2010 compared to 2009.
[IMAGE]Servicers of ""Fannie Mae"":http://www.fanniemae.com and ""Freddie Mac"":http://www.freddiemac.com loans completed 946,305 foreclosure prevention actions in 2010, according to data from the GSEs' regulator, the ""Federal Housing Finance Agency"":http://www.fhfa.gov (FHFA). In 2009, they completed 431,098.
FHFA also stressed in its report that the performance of loans modified in the first three quarters of 2010 improved relative to loans modified in earlier periods, as payment reductions increased.
[COLUMN_BREAK]That trend is expected to continue. Nearly half of completed loan modifications in the fourth quarter of last year lowered borrowers' monthly payments by over 30 percent, FHFA said.
Looking closer at the last three months of 2010, the agency says although loan modifications declined by 18 percent to nearly 119,800, marking the second consecutive quarter mod actions have fallen, refinancings through the government's Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) increased 30 percent during the same period.
The GSEs' foreclosure starts and completed third-party foreclosure sales declined in the fourth quarter. FHFA attributed this largely to the fact that some servicers of Fannie and Freddie loans imposed a moratorium on foreclosures last fall to address operational issues and affidavit errors.
Foreclosure sales went from 138,000 during the third quarter of last year to 77,000 during the fourth, according to FHFA’s report. New foreclosures initiated fell from 339,000 to 310,000 over that same timeframe.
FHFA says combined completed foreclosure prevention actions total more than 1.4 million since the Fannie and Freddie were placed in conservatorship in September 2008.
