For the past 13 months, the housing coalition HOPE NOW has provided assistance to over 2 million distressed homeowners so that they can continue to keep their homes and stop foreclosure. This is according to the latest report released by the group.
Last July, the alliance composed of counselors, investors and mortgage servicers also reported that it was able to fix over 192,000 mortgage problems. This is the highest number of workouts recorded for a single month since the alliance was formed last year.
But despite this, there seem to be no dent made on the national foreclosure crisis as more and more foreclosure filings were recorded for the same month. In fact, data gathered by RealtyTrac showed a 55 year-on-year increase in national foreclosure rate.
HOPE NOW is worried that their efforts are being outpaced by the mortgage mess. To reduce the distance, the coalition has decided to step up its pace and try to reach more troubled borrowers. It is currently promoting via public announcements and advertisements. Homeowners in default will also be receiving letters from the group, urging them to seek assistance.
One of the problems that the alliance observed is that there is a significant percentage of struggling homeowners who refuse to seek help for their mortgage problems and choose instead to sit around and wait for the banks to repossess their homes. Even though HOPE NOW has sent out more than 1.6 million letters to troubled borrowers beginning last November, advising them to contact their lenders, less than 20 percent managed to do so.
For the group, this is once concern that they need to address – how to convince homeowners to negotiate with their lenders.
With its new objective of helping more homeowners in default, HOPE NOW is also hoping that the number of foreclosure filings will finally go down.
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