A new study shows why restructuring mortgages and implementing a loan modification plan that works is harder than it seems.  Even though the foreclosure crisis is awful, there has at least been nationwide agreement on the best solution for foreclosure prevention: Get more mortgage lenders to modify the home loans of more homeowners. Whittling down the principal, interest or both should benefit all concerned: Homeowners get to keep their houses; lenders save the huge cost of repossessing and reselling a distressed homes; and neighborhoods avoid the appearance of dropping property values. It should be a win-win-win — which is why the Bush administration launched an effort to promote loan modifications and the Obama administration continued the expansion of loan workouts.   Even so, none of these loss mitigation programs has quite lived up to its promise. Under the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), the Treasury Department offered lenders up to $75 billion to help them defray the cost of reducing borrowers’ monthly payments to 31% of their incomes. It also enticed loan servicers with $1,000 for each modification, plus another $1,000 for each modified loan that is still performing after 3 years. The Obama administration estimated that as many as 4 million households would benefit. But after 4 months, only 350,000 borrowers have even been offered new home mortgages, just over half of which have gone into effect, according to the Treasury. . According to RealtyTrac 1,155,299 homes are facing new foreclosure filings from March through June,

FOX Video on Loan Modification for Preventing Foreclosures

It’s still too early to pass final judgment on HAMP. Cleary the program and others like it are struggling in part because of the rising rate of unemployment, which makes it impossible for many people to pay any kind of mortgage, even a more affordable one. No doubt, as critics of the financial industry suggest, many servicers have been slow to train enough staff to do modifications and investors in mortgage-backed securities pose a lingering obstacle.   But new research suggests that the mortgage loan modification effort may also be based on faulty economic assumptions.

According to economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the win-win-win concept of mortgage modification understates two of lenders’ strongest incentives to foreclose. The first is that roughly 30% of troubled debtors eventually can pay without a loan modification; thus, for lenders, 30% of the total cost of the loan modification is wasted. And since lenders can’t know in advance which 30% will “self-cure,” they hesitate to offer any mortgage modifications.   The 2nd problem is the risk that homeowners re-default on a modified loan. By the time that happens, the value of the house has declined further, and foreclosure costs the lender even more than it would have earlier. The HAMP program includes $10 billion for partial protection against that risk, but it may not be enough, especially given the sour outlook for employment.

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