by | ARTICLES, ECONOMY
The WSJ had a nice little piece last month on the failures of HAMP. I concur — we need to cut this program out immediately
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Proposing cuts to housing programs has never been politically popular, so maybe it’s a sign of the times that Ohio’s Jim Jordan and other Republicans are floating a bill to terminate the Obama Administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program, or Hamp. Or maybe, just maybe, this latest waste of taxpayer money is so egregious that the bill’s sponsors figure even Democrats can get on board. Let us hope.
Hamp was launched in 2009 to reward mortgage servicers for modifying contracts and borrowers for staying current on their payments. The goal was to help three to four million homeowners avoid foreclosure. Yet two years later, the number of applications cancelled has exceeded those approved, and some homeowners have been forced into foreclosure while awaiting a decision.
Hamp was flawed from its inception. If the last few decades of public housing policy have taught anything, it’s that programs to keep people in homes they can’t afford is a bad idea—and, in any case, bureaucrats are terrible managers. Treasury administered Hamp but contracted day-to-day oversight to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The launch was rushed and the rules for loan modifications were repeatedly changed.
One year into the program, more than one million borrowers had entered trial modifications, swamping mortgage servicers. Seventy-eight percent of borrowers were already in default before starting the trial, according to Treasury data released last week. Many loans weren’t viable from the beginning and wouldn’t benefit even from the low interest rates facilitated by the Federal Reserve.
The numbers bear that out. According to Treasury data, 792,529 trial and permanent Hamphome loan modifications have been cancelled, compared to 521,630 homeowners who have had their mortgages “permanently modified.” Applications for Hamp modifications are now slowing markedly. The Congressional Oversight Panel estimated last month that on current trendsHamp will prevent at most 700,000 to 800,000 foreclosures.
Meantime, private mortgage servicers—who can price risk more accurately—have outstrippedHamp. The Hope Now coalition estimates that last year non-Hamp modifications totaled about 1.2 million loans. That’s about double what Hamp has done over the same period. Treasury claims that Hamp redefault rates are less than those of the private sector, but that is hard to verify because borrowers who drop out of Hamp in the trial period aren’t counted in the redefault statistics.
The Obama Administration nonetheless keeps hawking Hamp, and last month Treasury’s Timothy Massad told Congress that “helping over 500,000 people enter into permanent modification, people who would otherwise be thrown out of their homes” are “dollars well spent.”Hamp is funded through the Troubled Asset Relief Program and has spent $840 million of the $29.9 billion allocated to the Making Home Affordable Program, most of which is for Hamp.
That’s not persuasive to Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for Tarp, who last month noted Treasury’s “astonishing silence” and refusal to “provide an estimate, goal, or projection of the total number of permanent modifications it expects to complete and maintain.” It’s hard to know if money is “well spent” if you don’t know what defines success.
If you measure success by the housing market, Hamp has failed miserably. According to RealtyTrac, 2.9 million homes received foreclosure filings in 2010, up from 2.8 million in 2009 and 2.3 million in 2008. The bellwether Case-Shiller home price index is falling again. Hamp is one more artificial prop to a housing market that will recover faster if foreclosures are allowed to proceed more rapidly and the homes are resold. By all means give Hamp the hook.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703956604576110412700522054.html
by | ARTICLES, ECONOMY, POLITICS
Continuing on the housing theme, I wanted to share with you an article written on February 7 by Robbie Whelan of the WSJ. Mr. Whelan has a good run-down on the current housing and lending situation as well as the accurate status of HAMP (Home Affordable Modification Program).
By ROBBIE WHELAN and ANTHONY KLAN
As the federal government’s flagship mortgage-modification program comes under scrutiny for failing to meet its goal of helping three to four million troubled homeowners, state-level efforts to boost modifications appear to be picking up momentum.
The Treasury reported Monday that the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, had provided permanent help to 521,630 homeowners since the program began in spring 2009.
By comparison, over the same period, banks negotiating directly with borrowers have made about two million permanent loan modifications outside the government’s program. These modifications continued to rise in recent months even as the number of HAMP modifications trailed off.
Critics of HAMP say the program has made little impact on the housing market and should be ended. Last week, House Republicans introduced a bill to end the effort, calling it a “colossal failure.” The administration defends the program.
“I think we’ve got to remember that HAMP has achieved over a half-million modifications. These are people that make $50,000 a year, so to sort of write it off and say, ‘Well, it’s a failure,’ I think is not really appropriate,” said Tim Massad, an acting assistant Treasury secretary, in a hearing on Capitol Hill last week.
Banks say they are doing more of their own modifications—and fewer HAMP mods—because eligibility requirements for HAMP are more stringent. Once a borrower is deemed ineligible for the government program, a modification worked out directly with the bank sometimes is the best option.
But also having a big impact are state mandates requiring banks and loan-servicing companies to hold mediation sessions with borrowers prior to foreclosing, said lawyers for delinquent borrowers and judges handling foreclosure cases.
About 20 states encourage some type of foreclosure mediation program to allow borrowers and lenders to hammer out a settlement, according to the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank. Three of those states—New York, Florida and Connecticut—and a handful of cities make mediation mandatory.
In Florida, Fannie Mae has begun testing a foreclosure-prevention program to get banks to meet with troubled borrowers to negotiate mortgage modifications and other alternatives before filing foreclosure documents in court.
“If they’re looking at mounting legal costs and risks to foreclose, then the workout process might seem like the best option,” said Alan M. White, a professor of law at Valparaiso University in Indiana, who has written extensively on the mortgage crisis. “Banks have got states preventing you from foreclosing…dismissing cases and ordering mediation, those are just two tools that state judges have.”
Others say banks are more willing to modify loan terms—which generally means reducing interest rates, forgoing late fees and extending the terms of loans—because it’s starting to be cheaper than completing a foreclosure. In some cases, in some states, that process can take years and thousands of dollars in legal fees to complete.
Among the banks to ramp up modifications isWells Fargo & Co., which plans to hold 20 large-scale mediation sessions across the country this year. More than 150,000 borrowers who have missed payments, or have been in modification negotiations, have or will be invited to come to hotels and convention centers for rapid-fire meetings the bank hopes will result in loan modifications.
That’s what happened to Patricia Yador, 53, of West Orange, N.J. at a “home preservation workshop” held at the Marriott hotel in downtown Brooklyn last Tuesday. Wells Fargo, her mortgage servicer, agreed after a mediation conference to knock more than 2 percentage points off the interest rate on her $300,000 mortgage.
That cut her monthly payments from $3,257 to $2,833.
“These are tears of joy because [before] they always turned me down,” said Ms. Yador, who has owned her home for 17 years and lives on $2,100 in disability and pension payments since she stopped working as a hospital accounts manager about three years ago.
Ms. Yador was one of 30,000 borrowers that Wells Fargo invited to participate in the modification fair in the New York-New Jersey area. Borrowers like Ms. Yador, who end up in a non-HAMP modification, are far more common than those who go through the government program. Of the roughly 600,000 loan modifications made by Wells Fargo since January, 2009, 86% have been done outside of HAMP, and 14% through HAMP.
HAMP offers servicers financial incentives to reduce loans to 31% or less of a borrower’s income, but it also has stringent requirements for eligibility. Borrowers who have lost their jobs or who have expensive medical conditions or other debts often are rejected by HAMP.
A Wells Fargo spokesman said the modification fairs are driven by the bank’s desire to do right by its customers. But others say the stepped up efforts are in response to ratcheted-up pressure from the states.
For the last two years in Philadelphia, where foreclosures are handled by judge, courts have moved to a system where they automatically schedule a “conciliation conference” within 30 to 45 days of each foreclosure filing.
Servicers are required to send a representative in person or by telephone to these conferences. If they fail to do so, the case can be postponed. The courts also keep mediators and pro bono housing lawyers on hand to serve borrowers.
“Yes, we are asserting pressure, but it’s almost as if they want the pressure,” said Annette Rizzo, a judge with the Court of Common Pleas in Philadelphia. “The banks always say that reaching out to homeowners, it’s a black hole. It’s so hard to connect with them. That’s what we offer, to connect with them.”
About 75% of eligible, struggling homeowners show up for and participate in mediation sessions in Philadelphia court rooms, and they have produced about a 35% success rate for about 14,000 loans according to an evaluation of the program to be released next month. Programs in Staten Island, NY and Bloomington, Indiana, have produced similarly high participation rates.
To be sure, not every mediation or modification results in significant savings for homeowners and it’s not clear how these modification will perform over time.
In the third quarter, modifications done in the HAMP program reduced monthly payments by an average of $585, almost double the $332 reduction in payments for modifications done outside the HAMP program. Those loans with modifications that reduced payments by 10% or more were almost twice as likely to be current than those loans with modifications that reduced payments by less than 10%.
