By Nick Timiraos | The Wall Street Journal
The Obama administration is set to announce Thursday that its signature consumer-mortgage modification initiative, due to expire at the end of the year, will be extended for two more years.
Senior administration officials said Wednesday that despite a nascent housing-market recovery, it didn’t make sense to dismantle the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, given the real-estate bust’s lingering damage.
About 1.1 million borrowers were in some stage of foreclosure at the end of April, according to a report released Wednesday by CoreLogic, CLGX -0.11% and banks have been completing some 52,000 foreclosures a month.
President Barack Obama unveiled HAMP to great fanfareone month after he took office in 2009, but it quickly ran into a series of setbacks. Officials wanted to ensure taxpayer money wasn’t wasted, so they required lots of documentation. That created headaches as banks rejected borrowers who they said provided incomplete forms, while borrowers routinely complained that banks lost their paperwork. The House of Representatives voted to scrap the program two years ago, though the measure wasn’t taken up in the Senate.
Related: Phoenix home foreclosure rate down sharply from a year ago
If you’d like to discuss real estate matters, contact Rose Law Group founder Jordan Rose, jrose@roselawgroup.com
