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There's an interesting article in Sunday's Times about attempts by Countrywide borrowers to keep their houses. Countywide has "a 2,700-member unit, called the HOPE Team, that it says helps borrowers modify their loans and hold onto their homes."
But Mark Seifert, executive director of Empowering and Strengthening Ohio’s People, a consumer advocacy group in Cleveland, is dubious. He said his experience with Countrywide, one of the dozen or so lenders and servicers with whom he works on behalf of borrowers, has been unsatisfactory.For the first eight months of this year, he said, his group took in 132 cases in which Countrywide was the loan servicer. Of those, two ended up in what he called “very good” workouts from the company. One involved forged documents when the original loan was made, Mr. Seifert said, and the other involved a borrower who received her deal from Countrywide the day before she was set to testify before Congress last July about her problems with the company.But don't fear ... Countrywide is going to expand this team. Here's the last graph of the piece:
Such efforts may soon become more difficult. At an investor conference on Sept. 18, Angelo R. Mozilo, Countrywide’s chief executive, said the company would be hiring more staff members to do home-retention and loss-mitigation work. Those employees, however, will be based in India.This is particularly horrifying in light of the fact that even a borrower advocacy group had terrible results -- can you imagine how difficult the process looks if you are approaching it solo? I've long been suspicious of the lack of counseling and technical help available to borrowers of all sorts in this country. There is plenty of talk about bailing out (or not) the lenders involved in the sub-prime meltdown. But what of rehabilitating the borrowers? --Phoebe Connelly
