WASHINGTON - the administration Obama facilitates the owners out of work to stay home, he tries to reorganize its troubled foreclosure prevention program.
Effective August 1, the Federal Housing Administration will extend the period for unemployed homeowners missing mortgage payments for a full year of three or four months. That will enable qualified owners to go without a monthly payment for 12 months before the beginning of the process of foreclosure.
Long grace period applies to loans backed on the FHA, which are generally low - and middle - income borrowers and represent about 14 percent of all active mortgages and about 25 percent of new mortgages. The grace period also applies to owners of homes in the program of the Government home affordable Modification.
But the change will probably only help "of tens of thousands" of owners, Secretary of housing and urban development Shaun Donovan said Thursday.
Last year, about 17 000 owners received a delay supported by the Government on their mortgage payments. Approximately 3 500 borrowers loans insured FHA fall their mortgages each month because of unemployment, officials said, and another 10 000 unemployed homeowners took advantage of a period of three months of mortgage payments in the past year.
Donovan said administration officials hope private lenders and companies controlled by the Government mortgage Giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which 90% of all new mortgages back, will adopt a similar policy.
"Our hope is that this will have a wider effect", Donovan said during a conference call.
But Fannie and Freddie reported that they would not add a broader rule, OFFS, saying they had confidence in their existing policies for homeowners.
New rules already go into force on 1 October for the mortgage giant allow forbearance in the long term when a house or a place of work has been destroyed; If the owner or person in charge has a long-term disability or illness; or if the borrower has died and that the property is in approval.
Mortgage payments can be made off the coast for a year in these cases.
"We believe that these guidelines provide appropriate tools to avoid foreclosure whenever possible for owners to unemployment," said Andrew Wilson, a spokesman for Fannie Mae.
The Government has launched its program of foreclosure Chief in 2009 by lowering monthly payments of homeowners at risk of foreclosure. Borrowers begin with payments less experimental. But the program did not transform them into permanent loan modifications.
More than 1.6 million of troubled homeowners received trial changes during the last two years. But the majority of the applicants, about 854,000 owners have abandoned the program entirely.
In recent weeks, administration officials acknowledged that housing has become a brake on the economy. The President Barack Obama said the housing market has "More Têtu we try to solve the problem," a meeting of the hotel to city-style Wednesday on Twitter.
He acknowledged that the Government programs to help the owners were not "enough" and said the administration was "back to the drawing board."
Homeowners in foreclosure assistance program also receive lower than 2% of the rate of interest for five years. They repay their loans over a longer period. The median savings for those who remain in the program are about $526 per month.
Those who have delayed payments must repay their, with interest.
But many owners have complained that the program was a bureaucratic mess. Some have said that they were disqualified after that banks lost their documents and did not return their phone calls. Banks criticized owners for failing to submit the necessary documents.
Last month, the Obama administration blamed three largest mortgage lenders U.S. for the failures of the foreclosure program, saying that they had not done enough to help people at risk of losing their homes. The Department of the Treasury said that it was accepted financial incentives which amounted to up to $1,000 a permanent loan modification, arguing that the three lenders had incorrectly determined that many people was ineligible for assistance.
The lenders, Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase & Co., challenged the data, saying: they were based on old reports, not the audits of the first quarter of the year as the Government claims.
