The housing department hasn’t set a deadline for a decision, said Lemar Wooley, a spokesman.  According to Anthony Hsieh, CEO of LoanDepot.com, an online mortgage originator based in Irvine, California, the process costs $3,000 to $6,000 to train and pay the fees for each new employee to comply with the mortgage-licensing system. “The mortgage reform law is supposed to make sure we kick the bad ones out,” said Hsieh. “It could be the opposite, keeping the good loan officers out.”

The Nevada Supreme Court recently said that the mortgage loan modification law is governed for the lawmakers’ intent. Nevada Supreme Court officials said that the administrative rules are adjusted to make a solution if any problems arise between the homeowner and the lender.  The State further noted that there have already been three changes in rules for administering the mortgage loan modification law from the previous year.  In addition, Ron Titus, director of the Administrative Office of the Courts said, “We have 270 mediators, and the vast majority operate very comfortably within the rules of the program and work very hard to help the parties find common ground and reach a resolution.” Titus further states that the mediators can assure a reliable process and there will be unprejudiced treatment between the lender and the homeowner. 

The mortgage loan modification law only has one sanction and it can only be applied to the lenders. If a particular lender won’t show up for the mediation meeting, he will be given a sanction. This has only occurred once when Clark County District Judge Donald M. Mosley ordered a $50,000 sanction against Flagstar Bank FSB. The lender failed to appear in a hearing and was not able to pass any legal documentations of foreclosure in a particular mediation meeting. This loan modification article was written by Jason Blackmore.

What else could you call it when almost 1 in 7 of South and Central Floridians who jumped into the Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable Program in January in hopes of getting a loan modification had dropped out by May?  The borrowers who have dropped out have joined an exodus of more than 215,000 borrowers nationwide in the past five months. They went through the trouble of applying, only to leave with nothing to show for it.

The answer, according to representatives of Chase and Wells Fargo/Wachovia among the largest banks operating in Florida is: Those borrowers did not meet the loan modification qualifications. Many of the mortgage relief prospects were not able to send in the documentation or their loan modification application was not completed correctly.

Using the May report from the Treasury Department, it’s clear that Miami-Fort Lauderdale and Orlando-Kissimmee are the largest metro markets in the nation for loan modifications. The two regions account for 6.8% of all Making Home Affordable loans nationwide, topping Los Angeles 6.4% and New York 6.1%.  Here, even those borrowers who do get a loan modification say the process is too vexing. Even if they comply with all the lender’s rules, borrowers say they get the runaround and often, contradictory answers from one day to the next.  Read the original article online Thousands giving up on home loan modification hopes.

BofA is working to develop assistance plans and programs to help its borrowers through the crisis, a spokesperson for BofA said. The bank developed similar loan programs following the hurricanes in 2005 and in other disaster situations in the US. Usually, disasters call for an initial 90-day forbearance of payments for BofA borrowers, and, like Freddie Mac, individuals needing more time will be handled on a case-by-case basis.  BofA is currently analyzing its portfolio of mortgages and loan modifications in the region and assessing the situation to determine what other specific needs may need to be addressed in a disaster assistance program for victims of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

According to a statement from Wells Fargo, the bank extended its borrowers affected by the Gulf Coast oil spill a 90-day foreclosure moratorium.  “We encourage customers affected by the Gulf events (loss of job or income) to reach out to us to discuss loan workout possibilities.  They suggest working with their with our home loan consultants on to determine available home refinance and loan modification options for their homeownership and financial needs.”

But I think that the so far lackluster results from MHA do point to something important, which is that we don’t have the kind of mortgage crisis we thought we had when we passed the modification.  This represents not only a shift in our thinking about how to fix the housing markets, but a major shift in our national narrative about the housing bubble.  Six to nine months ago, the major story we told in connection with the financial crisis was the homeowner suckered–by either fraud or greed–into a teaser loan with an artificially low interest rate that was going to turn disastrous when it reset.

We have seen some of that, to be sure, particularly with the “Option ARM” or “negative amortization” loans on which homeowners weren’t even making the full interest payment.  But that hasn’t turned out to be our biggest problem, largely because we are in a very low interest rate environment right now, so many people saw their rates reset downward rather than up.  Instead, we are plagued by negative home equity.  Most mortgage lenders have begun shutting down access to home equity credit lines because of depreciating home values and unemployment.  Look for a proven loan modification program designed to make your bad credit home loan payment more affordable.

According to California loan relief guru, Jeff Morris, “Homeowners need to take a deep breath and reevaluate their mortgage relief options, even if they were recently denied by a loan modification company or mortgage lender, because new opportunities have arisen.”  For borrowers with no equity looking to refinance, they should consider the Home Affordable Refinance Program that enables the refinancing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage liens up to 125%.

The progress report, the second issued by the government, says that 360,165 homeowners who were at least two months behind in payments received relief through August. A month ago, just 9%, or 235,247 homeowners, were in the process of receiving a loan modification. The Obama administration has come under fire for the program’s rocky start. Officials, who met with servicers in Washington in late July, said they are on track to hit their goal of 500,000 loan modifications under way by November 1. “Our progress in implementing these programs to date has been substantial, but we recognize that much more has to be done to help homeowners,” said Michael Barr, an assistant Treasury secretary.

The $75 billion initiative was announced in February and the first institutions to join began accepting applications in April. The plan, which is projected to help up to 4 million homeowners, calls for servicers to lower the mortgage payments of eligible homeowners to no more than 31% of their pre-tax income.  Some 47 servicers are participating in the Obama program, up from 38 servicers a month ago. Financial institutions, borrowers and home loan investors all receive incentives for participating in the program. By releasing the servicers’ progress reports each month, the administration is hoping to hold institutions responsible for their performance. The updates will allow the public to see which institutions are lagging in implementing the plan.

After the August report came out, servicers acknowledged they needed to improve their performance and promised to do better in the future. Homeowners continue to complain that loan service companies are not responding to their calls for mortgage refinancing and loan modifications applications applications, losing their paperwork or not making decisions. The financial institutions said they are ramping up their staffing and computer systems to handle the crush of applications. Moving quickly is important. The number of people falling behind on their payments continues to mount, especially as unemployment rises.

A record number of foreclosure filings were posted in July, according to RealtyTrac. There were more than 360,000 properties with foreclosure filings — including default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — an increase of 7% from June and 32% from July 2008

The bill, which has an “urgency clause” attached to it, now must pass the State Senate, and if passed, could be signed by the Governor on October 11th, and go into effect immediately thereafter.  SB 94’s author is California State Senator Ron Calderon, the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone familiar with the bigger picture.  Sen. Calderon, while acknowledging that fee-for-service providers can provide valuable services to homeowners at risk of foreclosure, authored SB 94 to ensure that providers of these loan modification services are not compensated until the contracted services have been performed.

SB 94 prevents loan modification companies, brokers, individuals… and even lawyers… from receiving fees or any other form of compensation until after the contracted services have been rendered.  What loan modification company in their right mind would go through 120 days of work negotiating a loan modification with their client’s lender only to have the client say, sorry we don’t have the money to pay you for your services. 

The loan modification bill will now go to the Democratic controlled Senate where it is expected to pass.  Loan modification executive, Glen Silver said in a recent press conference, “Too bad for genuine loan modification companies, Bush couldn’t get a third term, because he wouldn’t have signed it, but we know everyone’s buddy Obama would sign a national bill as soon as he smells political success.”  Silver continued, “The President would be able tell his buddies on capitol hill that he saved Americans from loan mod scams, but really he is just going to kill the loan mod business and lenders will get their leverage back.  I guarantee the lender lobbyists created this bill.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJUDyTTf25k

Supporters of the loan modification fraud bill say that the state is literally teeming with con artists who take advantage of homeowners desperate to save their homes from foreclosure by charging hefty fees up front and then failing to deliver anything of value in return.  They say that by making it illegal to charge up-front fees, they will be protecting consumers from being scammed.

Yes there have been some shady brokers who committed predatory lending abuses that took advantage of distressed homeowners, but thousands of borrowers benefitted from genuine mortgage relief negotiations from trust-worthy loan modification firms across California. The actual number of loan mod scams remains unclear.  Now that we’ve learned that lenders and servicers have only modified an average of 9% of qualified mortgages under the Obama plan, it’s hard to tell which companies were scamming and which were made to look like scams by the servicers and lenders who failed to live up to their agreement with the federal government.

In fact, ever since it’s come to light that mortgage servicers have been sued hundreds of times, that they continue to violate the HAMP provisions, that they foreclose when they’re not supposed to, charge up-front fees for mortgage loan modification plans, require homeowners to sign waivers, and so much more, who can be sure who the scammers really are.  Let’s consider how the President is cracking down on corruption…Bank of America, received the worst grade of any bank on Obama’s report card listing because they only modified 4% of the home loans from borrower’s who were eligible for mortgage relief since the plan began.  Didn’t the government give Bank of America 200 billion in the bank bail-out of the century?  Bank executives assert that the loss mitigation department is running into obstacles handling the incoming phone calls.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvbXl2bqo-Y

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.