BiggerPockets

Hope for Home Owners Program - 3 Year Later!

Saturday, September 11

The FHA - Hope for Home Owner's Program - 3 Years Later!

It's been almost 3 years since the launch of the Hope for Home Owner Program, offered by the FHA and lenders across America.  The program was supposed to save over 400,000 households from foreclosure to the sum of $300 Billion dollars.

I spend almost 2.5 years on the project trying to offer solutions to help homeowners.  I was the first to launch a website to offer video education, program information and other solutions.  My site  called: HopeforHomeOwnersProgram.org had over 1.75 million clicks in the first few months. You can still google it today and it is at the top of the search engines. I took between 6 to 10 thousand mortgage loan applications thru the automated system. I have recently removed much of the hours and hours of content, videos, etc. since it is no longer revelant and so much time has passed. My article called "Loan Modification VS. Hope for Home Owners Program" was read and/or downloaded by over 35,000 people. That's exposure :)  Still today, I get emails from people needing help. The contacts have been increasing lately, so, I expect a large rise in requests for help in the coming months.  Unemployment always rises in middle November and I expect to see some bad numbers. It's very sad. 

Now the sad part...

I have not seen a single person receive any benefit from the program. Banks and lenders choose not to deliver the program either internally or externally to help consumers.  Perhaps some got help, yet, I have not heard of anyone. I would guess that the 300 billion dollars is still sitting in the US Treasury. Perhaps it's been allocated to some other social program. Anyway, all of us working people are on the tax rolls to pay it off some day. 

Instead, the banks were offered a sweet heart deal to complete loan modifications and get monitary benefits for each one they completed. The federal government gave them money to do the loan mods internally.  A very low percentage of the loan modifications have been permamently secured by the banks.  The last I heard it was around 23%.  Wow, that's a success story. 

Short sales and foreclosures are on the rise and will continue in the future. A friend of mine, (Mark Hanson, Mr. Mortgage) told me that at current housing foreclosure, short sale and shadow inventory levels; it would take 8 years to clear out the bad inventory.  You can read his blog here.  Very interesting info.

Real Estate agents in metropolitan areas like Southern California will continue to be busy with short sales and REO activity.   It is my best assessment that prices of homes in hard hit areas like Las Vegas and Southern California will fall in the coming months. Refi activity continues to surge becasue of historic lows in rates but purchase money transactions are slow.  No more first time homebuyer programs to prop up the housing market.  Although, California still has the some incentive programs for first time home buyers, it's still slow.  Winter is coming and the kids are back in school.  The market conditions are about to really slow down.  If you're a realtor, better act fast or build up inventory for the slow months. 

Well, anyway, I thought you might find my personal story interesting since I spent so much time on a single project without any results.  I did meet a lot of great contacts and person's of influence.  It was a fun ride.  

Now it's back to hard work helping homeowners with short sales, REO's and traditional sales.  

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