Lender Continues to Buck Trend, Saves Home Through H4H

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http://www.housingwire.com/2008/12/31/lender-continues-to-buck-trend/

Long Island-based Lend America announced Tuesday it had not only successfully saved a borrower’s home from foreclosure as the California-area authority stood at the door ready to evict the residents, but the mortgage bank had made a hefty new year’s resolution for 2009 — saving 10,000 U.S. homes from foreclosure. A recently enacted Hope for Homeowners awareness program at the bank is slated to do much of the heroics, and has already saved at least one California home from foreclosure.

“Terry and Susan Cook initially owed their lender $491,000 and we refinanced them for $240,000,” mortgage specialist Clyde Ward in a press statement. Lend America stopped foreclosure on the Cook’s home — and eventually saved them $250,000 off the principal balance — when a California authority knocked on the door ready to evict on a misunderstanding. “I was able to get on the phone with them and let them know that the house was refinanced and that they should check with their superiors and verify what I was telling them,” Ward told HW in an interview.

The H4H loan was already in process at the time of the event and the paperwork had simply been misplaced at the office of the authority that came to evict the Cooks. “From beginning to end, we probably closed the loan in 20 days,” Ward said.

With a short but sketchy history, the Hope for Homeowners program (H4H) was passed in July and initially praised as a surefire method of promoting homeownership affordability and rescuing troubled borrowers. With fewer than 100 applications for Federal Housing Administration loans through Hope for Homeowners since the program’s effective start date of Oct. 1, it was clear by mid-November that some “meaningful changes” were needed. The U.S. Housing and Urban Development secretary Steve Preston on Nov. 19 announced that the Hope for Homeowners (H4H) Board of Directors had approved changes to the program to help more distressed borrowers refinance into affordable, government-back mortgages.