Hmmm.. Seattle Short Sale specialist discloses thoughts on HAMP

Flash… Lenders DON’T want to modify!

As as Seattle real estate agent who specializes in short sales and negotiating with your bank I am coming to conclusions about the Home Ownership Made Affordable Program (HAMP) effort to help millions of American homeowners in getting their home mortgages modified.  Sadly the numbers are all too revealing.  Another reason why Seattle short sales will increase, over the coming years, as distressed home owners receive more foreclosure notices, it’s simply a smarter choice!

The numbers… the guise of the rubric of everyone wanting to “Help the Homeowners Keep their Homes”, “Save Our Neighborhoods”, “The Banks Care About Their Clients”, “Banks Give a S&*%”.

The numbers show what is happening … The program has enrolled over 850,000 homeowners who are seriously delinquent in their mortgage payments in a trial modification period but has encountered significant problems in converting those trials into permanent loan modifications.

From my experience what I see is that the Government has created a program to help distressed homeowners and banks have adopted a public personal of wanting to work with homeowners under the guidelines of the Government program.  After all, the banks want to resolve the problem also!  But then you get the numbers… The numbers don’t lie.

My next blog will deal with the duplicity of banks in their efforts to abide by the HAMP guidelines while preying upon the lack of understanding of the typical distressed homeowner (who is a lot like a deer in the headlights). An example of a homeowner will show how they have been preyed upon. Come on back!

“The Treasury Department reported Friday that 66,500 of the 902,620 homeowners who had started the trial modification period for its Home Affordable Mortgage Program (HAMP) had completed the three month trial and entered into a permanent modification by the end of December.  Another 46,000 have satisfactorily completed the trial and have been given final documents but have not yet signed and returned them.

Although only a 7.4% conversion rate, this is more than double the 32,400 signed permanent modifications reported at the end of November.”