Feldman Law Center - On The Front Lines In The Home Loan Modification War

The reviews are coming in from across the country from homeowners that have tried to modify their mortgages on their own. Its not good news if youre going it alone on your home loan modification. The reviews pretty much echo the same themes; lost paperwork requiring multiple submissions of the same documents, uninformed processors giving incorrect and/or inconsistent answers, and delays in the form of waiting for hours on hold or weeks for a response.

The following are three accounts from the front lines interspersed with commentary on what may be causing the problems for the homeowners seeking modifications:

1) I've been getting the runaround since March from my mortgage holder, formerly Countrywide, now apparently Bank of America. Their MHA phone number sends a caller into a circle, on a goose chase, until eventually you get a person on the phone who has no authority and no ability to assist you in your endeavors to modify your loan.

The problem here is that since the announcement in February 2009 of the Making Home Affordable plan lenders and servicers have been inundated with calls. According to The Treasury Department, JP Morgan Chase gets 8,000 to 10,000 calls per day on the program. Staffing and training requirements just take that amount of incoming calls is a huge undertaking.

2) I stopped paying my mortgage altogether to see of that would get their attention. It did. I was threatened with foreclosure by mail and was finally advised by someone I got on the phone to fax a hardship letter and certain financial documents, as well as pay off the few months of mortgage for which I was in arrears or face foreclosure, and then they just might get the ball rolling on considering me for a loan modification which could take 90 more days. They harassed me by phone sometimes three times a day until I paid my balance off, promising to set the modification wheels in motion if I did. Now that I've paid, they are once again silent and unreachable.

It sounds like the homeowner might have been dealing with different departments at B of A. Lenders and servicers are so overwhelmed that their only concern is putting out fires. A homeowner that is current is a very low priority but once she started missing her payments she was contacted by the Loss Mitigation Department at the bank as evidenced by the request for a hardship letter. The harassing calls that were received 3 times a day came from the Collections Department. In most cases, the two departments have completely different agendas and do not communicate with each other. Collections departments are known to do whatever it takes to bring money in, including making promises they cant keep. Had the homeowner hired legal representation to advance her interests in her loan modification, she could have referred the collections calls to her law firm and avoided making those payments.

3) As far as I and my family are concerned, the so-called 'homeowners' bailout' isn't working very well. The problem seems to be that when people are dealing with these big banks (our mortgage is with JPMorgan Chase), the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing. There seems to be no way to get our papers into the hands of the actual decision-makers. We have submitted our paperwork for a loan modification about 4 times. Each time, someone else calls to ask why we are not paying our mortgage payment and to tell us that they haven't received all the paperwork we've been sending! It is soooo frustrating. A couple of times when we called to inquire about the status of our modification application, we reached customer representatives in India and Panama! Seems to me that President Obama needs to make sure banks have a more streamlined and efficient process for dealing with distressed homeowners like me.

Echoing some of the same concerns as the previous homeowner, this person running into the issue of high turnover at the lender/servicer. As loan processors become more proficient at understanding modification guidelines they get either get moved up to take on more complex modifications or to train incoming processors. Files end up going downstream through the hands of different processors, requiring multiple submissions of the same paperwork. Some of the call center work is being sourced out of the U.S. to provide assistance to homeowners seeking information on modifying their mortgages. It may come as no surprise that reviews on off-shore call centers have been lukewarm, at best.

4) Since I live in Michigan and our economic downturn has been among the worst in the country, my home is under water like those thousands of others. My mortgage was sold to a company far away from Michigan, to a mortgage company that puts me on hold and says "your call is important to us" for hours. When I finally reach a real human being I am told first that it will take 4 to 6 weeks and more recently that it will take 6 to 8.

The overwhelming volume of people seeking home loan modifications has extended the amount of time it takes to complete the process. In this persons case, a six to eight week timeline is relatively fast.

Much of what these homeowners are experiencing can be avoided by working with an experienced attorney. Knowledge of the guidelines in place and various protocols followed by lenders and servicers can go a long way toward getting a successful loan modification.

About the Author:
Call the team at The Feldman Law Center at (800) 527 8497 today to learn about their proven home loan modification / mortgage loan modification process. Or visit us online at feldmanlawcenter.com

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