Troubled Homeowners and Borrowers Deserve More Time

Robert Strupp, a consumer advocate at Community Law Center in Baltimore, said he has no problem giving mortgage servicers more time to "ramp up" loan modification efforts — as long as they extend that courtesy to troubled homeowners.

"If you stop foreclosures while you ramp up, everybody wins," Strupp, the law center's director of research and policy, said last week at the American Association of Residential Mortgage Regulators' conference in Savannah, Ga. "Everybody should get the same amount of time."


He was responding to an industry lawyer who said servicers are still in the process of hiring and training staff to handle the onslaught of requests for loan modifications.

Another consumer advocate, Kerry Smith of Community Legal Services in Philadelphia, told the conference that borrowers seeking loan modifications are "frustrated by a completely broken system."

Though the Obama administration has contracts with servicers that administer 75% of all loans, she said, "We hear from consumers" that their pleas to have their loans modified "are being turned down without any further explanation."

source: American Banker