The truth about HAMP

Over the course of President Barack Obama's first year in office, one of the priorities of his administration has been to stabilize the residential housing market. And there have been some signs of success, such as home prices finally touching bottom in a number of cities across the country.

Despite these salubrious data points, it's fairly obvious the residential sector remains troubled, as foreclosures and defaults continue to sweep across the nation. In short, more and more homeowners are still losing their homes.

The intransigence of the foreclosure and default problems has so far defied the best efforts of lenders to work their way out of the mess. All this becomes obvious when we look at recent statistics from the government's own Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP).

As of January, more than 900,000 homeowners were in "temporary" trial loan modification plans, but mortgage servicers had managed to convert only about 63,000, or 7 percent, of the temporary modifications to permanent modifications, reported the Treasury Department.

(While mortgage servicers may or may not be the originator of your loan, they are the companies responsible for the ongoing management of your existing mortgage by collecting loan payments, crediting your account, handling escrow, etc. If you are behind on your mortgage, the firm you are dealing with is the servicer.)

With this in mind, the government took another shot at fixing the problems with HAMP, introducing at the end of January new guidelines aimed at streamlining requirements.

The guidelines now specify what documents borrowers must provide to loan servicers and that servicers must collect the documents before starting borrowers on three-month trial modifications.

"Not only do we have a multitude of individuals applying for loan modifications, but every lender seemed to have its own documentation standard and guidelines," observes Sylvia Alayon, vice president of operations for the Consumer Mortgage Audit Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. "What the government has done is wrapped some rules around documentation standards and added a timeline."

Will all this save HAMP?

The problem is not with HAMP, itself, says Alan White, industry-watcher and assistant professor at Valparaiso University School of Law in Valparaiso, Ind., it's that the servicers aren't doing a good job.

Given that the industry voluntarily modified to permanent status more than 100,000 mortgages per month just before HAMP was announced, these results are miserable, White emphasizes. "There are salvageable mortgages getting lost because the servicers can't seem to do the job right."

Strong words!

So, what seems to be the problem with the mortgage servicers, most of which are banks?

As White sees the situation, over the past two to three years a lot of mortgage servicing got consolidated into four big banks (BofA, Citicorp, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo), all of which were not traditionally large subprime servicers. ...CONTINUED

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