Minnesota Mortgage Blog - MN Mortgage and Real Estate News

WHITE HOUSE WIDENING MORTGAGE REFINANCE RELIEF PROGRAM

The Obama administration has made changes recently to the current homeowner bailout program available to homeowners who are underwater on their home mortgage loans in an effort to stem the foreclosure problem.

The program is designed to allow homeowners to refinance to today's lower interest rates when under normal and traditional underwriting guidelines, they would not be able to do so.

The current program would allow strapped borrowers with mortgages up to 105% of their homes value as long as they were not behind on their mortgages. The changes just made allow borrowers to now have up to 125% loan-to-value and still be able to refiance.

BUT HOLD ON. While this sounds great on the surface, and while there has been a lot of consumer interest, the program has not come even close to expectations, helping significantly fewer people than Washington anticipated. It is because of these failures that they have expanded the loan-to-value limits.

This programs failures comes on the heals of two previously highly announced homeowner bailout programs called FHASecure and Hope For Homeowners, which both failed miserably in helping consumers.

Why do they fail? A huge issue on the current program has been that so many people owe more than 105% of the current value of their home. So this change should help qualify more people.

With this and the other programs, there is no lender mandate forcing lenders to participate. Many lenders understand giving people 100% (or higher) loans were part of the original problem, and simply refuse to offer the loans.

Underlying guidelines, shall we say "the small print" is also preventing many people from taking advantage of these programs.

In the end, while this announcement should help a lot more people, I also see this program being labeled a failure.

NOTE: If you previously tried refinancing, and you were OVER 105%, but UNDER 125%, please contact us to apply again! (we lend in MN, and WI only)

For more information on the "Making Homes Affordable Program", simply follow this link:

http://www.metzlermortgage.com/makinghomesaffordablerefi