Loss Mitigation

Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director James B. Lockhart submitted the agency’s first report to Congress yesterday detailing actions FHFA and the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) are taking to prevent unnecessary foreclosures.

The national law firm McGlinchey Stafford PLLC has unveiled a solution it says will make mortgage loan modifications efficient and seamless for financial institutions facing the prospect of large-scale processing demands.

HOPE NOW, the private sector alliance of mortgage servicers, counselors, and investors whose mission is to prevent foreclosures and keep homeowners in their homes, yesterday announced that the mortgage industry prevented 225,000 foreclosures in October.

Jacksonville, Florida’s USAffordable Home LLC recently introduced what it is calling a breakthrough product designed to preserve homeownership for those struggling to make their mortgage payments.

New Jersey’s Society for the Preservation of Continued Homeownership (SPOCH), a non-profit group which facilitates favorable mortgage loan workouts, has selected Walnut Creek, California-based National Loan Auditors (NLA) to administer forensic loan audits.

The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) has unveiled a plan to refinance billions of dollars of at-risk mortgages using funding from the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The initiative is aimed at helping credit union members preserve their homeownership by funneling federal loans to credit unions through the Central Liquidity Facility (CLF), the lending arm of the NCUA, the administration explained in a press statement earlier this week.

Mortgage financier Freddie Mac announced today that in the third quarter of 2008, 94 percent of prime borrowers who originally had a 1-year conforming adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) chose a new conforming fixed-rate mortgage when they refinanced.

In an environment where defaults continue to mount and home retention has become a mainstream issue, Florida-based Lender Processing Services Inc. (LPS), a provider of integrated technology and services to the mortgage industry, has created RediMod, an end-to-end solution for streamlining the mass loan modification process and improving servicers’ ability to help delinquent and at-risk borrowers.

United States Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Steve Preston today announced that the HOPE for Homeowners (H4H) board of directors has approved changes to the program, designed to help more distressed borrowers refinance into affordable, government-back mortgages.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) proposed on Friday to spend $24 billion of the $700 billion bailout package to help 1.5 million households avoid foreclosure. This new plan is a mild deviation from the FDIC’s $40 billion incentive-based foreclosure plan put forth to Congress committee members in late October, under which the government would guarantee part of homeowners’ modified loans.