Will Loan Modifications Lift the Housing Market?

The Obama administration wants to spend up to $100 billion on efforts to help homeowners, especially those facing foreclosure. But one of the leading ideas on how to do that — rewriting home loans to make mortgages affordable to struggling borrowers — is based on a startling lack of data about what works, and early evidence suggests that many lenders aren’t going to make substantial changes without serious strong-arming.

There are various ideas being bandied about, but the goal is common: to entice mortgages servicers, whether lenders themselves or third parties acting on behalf of investors, to rewrite the terms of loans so that people behind on payments might be able to keep their homes. (Read the four steps to ending the foreclosure crisis.)

One way being discussed to do that is for the government to share in the losses if a servicer modifies a mortgage and the homeowner again defaults. Another approach is to directly help pay for the cost of the modification. The servicer might cut monthly payments to 38% of a borrower’s income with the government chipping in to reduce the payment down to 31%, a presumably more sustainable level. Either tactic could be combined with a direct payment — $1,000 is a figure often mentioned — to incentivize servicers to do the heavy lifting of figuring out how much a homeowner can truly afford and recrafting his mortgage to match.

To a homeowner who has always made mortgage payments on time, perhaps by sacrificing spending elsewhere, the whole concept may seem grossly unfair. But society’s problems are unfortunately often our own. As the foreclosure rate has skyrocketed, and loan defaults have rippled from subprime mortgages into ones made to prime and near-prime borrowers, property values in many parts of the country have been pounded. There is an unavoidable correction going on in house prices, that much is true, but the swoon has caused additional problems as it traps many flailing borrowers in their homes. Simply selling your home when you can no longer afford it is often not an option at a time when some 18% of mortgage holders owe more than their house is worth.

In July, Congress tried to address the underlying problem by creating Hope for Homeowners. It’s a program meant to get people behind on their payments to refinance into more affordable loans. So far, the effort has gone practically nowhere. While tens of thousands of homeowners have called to ask questions, the program has only received 451 applications and closed 25 loans. That’s partly because of the program’s high barriers — homeowners have to get their existing lenders to write down the value of what they’re owed and then find a new lender to issue a fresh loan. Most major banks haven’t signed up to participate. On Feb. 3, the House Financial Services committee held a hearing on how to revamp the program.

In the meantime, the discussion has turned to ways to encourage lenders and servicers to modify their own loans. Most, if not all, firms are already doing this, and some, such as JP Morgan Chase, have announced major new efforts, since it is generally in a lender’s best interest to keep borrowers in their homes, even if they’re paying less. Foreclosure is such a costly process, a lender might easily only recoup half of what it’s owed. In August, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation instituted an aggressive loan-modification effort at the failed IndyMac Bank, and that program is now a template for what the government might encourage at a national level. Basically, the FDIC wants to set up a series of incentives, like $1,000 for each modification, as well as loss sharing, should rewritten loans run into trouble.

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But the failure of Hope for Homeowners has heightened awareness of the fact that it can be incredibly difficult to shape the behavior of private companies and create an effective fix for such a complicated problem. In December, the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) issued a report showing that at national banks and federally regulated thrifts, nearly 37% of homeowners were 60 or more days behind on their payments six months after receiving a modification. That re-default problem has received much attention as the national conversation has turned toward the idea of taxpayers standing behind modifications. “You wouldn’t want the government to be on the hook for someone who borrowed a lot more in credit-card debt, or what have you, and then couldn’t make their payments,” OCC head John Dugan said in an interview with Bloomberg. (See pictures of Americans in their homes.)

The prickly problem, though — as Dugan has pointed out — is that the available data from the OCC and OTS are rife with flaws. For instance, nowhere do servicers report what, exactly, they’re doing when they modify a loan. And that, as it turns out, is an incredibly important detail since other data show that in many cases what they’re doing is increasing a struggling borrower’s monthly payment. The Maryland Office of Financial Regulation, which collects data on some 380,000 loans from 65 servicers, found that of modifications completed last August and September, 42% kept the monthly payment the same and 18% actually raised it. An analysis of 3.5 million sub-prime and Alt-A loans by Valparaiso University’s Alan White found that 68% of modified loans tacked on unpaid interest and fees, adding an average $10,800 to the balance due. A lender that caps the existing interest rate on an otherwise adjustable mortgage or reamortizes missed payments over the life of the loan might legitimately view its efforts as giving ground to a struggling borrower — but that doesn’t mean those efforts provide the borrower with a fair chance of being able to make his new mortgage.

That’s why on Feb. 2, a group of 15 state attorneys general and banking regulators sent a letter to the OCC and OTS complaining that its data was muddying the public debate and begging for details about the modifications it tracks. “People are concerned about the effectiveness of loan modifications, which is very troubling to us,” says Iowa attorney general Tom Miller, who has been dealing with servicers as head of the 17-month-old State Foreclosure Prevention Working Group. “If they’re bad modifications and people default at a higher rate, it’s not surprising. But that shouldn’t be used to cast doubt on all modifications.”

Unfortunately, there is precious little data on what sorts of changes to mortgages do have the best shot of keeping borrowers in their homes in the long run. The most quoted research on the topic, from the investment bank Credit Suisse, shows — unsurprisingly — that when modifications involve lower monthly payments, borrowers have much more of a fighting chance. One report, looking at modifications made to a pool of sub-prime loans, found that 44% of loans with increased monthly payments were more than 60 days delinquent within eight months. After that same period, only 15% of loans that had received an interest-rate reduction and 23% in which the principal balance had been reduced were more than 60 days late. But oftentimes these more aggressive changes are not being made. White’s study found that only 10% of modifications involved principal write-down, and almost all of those cases came from just two services.

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One reason servicers haven’t more wholeheartedly adopted bolder tactics is lingering concern over getting sued by investors who are ultimately entitled to the loan payments through mortgage-related securities. Servicers are contractually bound to act in the interest of investors overall, but they might still not rewrite loans, even when that creates the most value in the aggregate, since modifications can impact certain investors more than others — and it only takes one to sue. That’s why on Feb. 4. the House Financial Services committee met to talk about making a law to shield servicers from such lawsuits. The law, first proposed by real estate and law professors at Columbia University, would create a so-called legal safe harbor, and ostensibly kick up modification efforts. The professors believe this to be the case because they’ve observed that firms that directly own mortgages are more successful at modifying them than are the companies servicing them for others. (Read the proposal from America’s realtors on how to revive the housing market.)

But even such a law combined with financial incentives for modification won’t guarantee that servicers will do what it takes to avoid foreclosure in the long run. Over the past few months, as loan defaults have continued to rise, the Maryland Office of Financial Regulation has noticed an increase in servicers crafting modifications with lower monthly payments. That’s a good sign — unless, perhaps, those lower payments come with a balloon payment further down the road, as White has often noticed in the loans he’s studied.

Nationally, the idea is similar — pushing back principal payments, not forgiving them entirely, is the solution trumpeted by the FDIC. That seems fairer: telling people that they can get a break now, but will eventually have to pay may alleviate qualms about handing out free rides. Or it may just be dooming us to have this conversation all over again. Unfortunately, without good data on what has worked so far, it’s remarkably difficult to determine what to do going forward. Of course, ignoring the issue hasn’t worked too well either.

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