A great HAMP and short sales was just written by Ryan Wessels. HAMP is the abbreviation that stands for Home Affordable Modification Program.
The home affordable modification program is a government run program that was supposed to help people facing foreclosure stay in there house.
The reality is that the program has not been able to help everyone that is facing foreclosure. As of late December the program had been successful in helping roughly 760,000 loans get modified. On the surface this sounds great, but if you dig a little farther you will find that only 31,000 of these loans have passed through the approval process and been successfully been permanently modified.
No one know how many of the remaining loans will be permanently modified. However, roughly nine months since the program was introduced, it has helped merely 3,500 households a month save their homes. The cost to taxpayers has been roughly 75 billion dollars.
Here is a great article that further explains the pitfall of HAMP. From our experience with Saint Louis short sales, we have dealt with more than one client who attempted the HAMP program only to be denied. The result of their denial caused them to decide the better solution was a short sale.
One of our clients was even still in the HAMP program when we began the short sale process. This St. Louis short sale began in late August. It took the lender eight weeks to finally get the HAMP program canceled!
Do not get me wrong, loan modification is a great solution for you if you want to keep your house. HOWEVER, in many cases this is not a realistic option and you risk losing your house to foreclosure by not exploring our short sale help.
For the lucky few, HAMP is a great thing and has helped them stay in their house. But for the majority of people facing foreclosure, it has not proven to be as helpful as I hoped it would be when they first introduced it.
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