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Secretary Geitner, Welcome to our World

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Services for Real Estate Pros with PartnerFirst

Secretary Geitner, Welcome to our World

In what might have been his most direct attack on mortgage servicer performance under Treasury sponsored programs designed to help American homeowners avoid foreclosure, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner  stated flatly that "we do not believe servicers are doing enough" when testifying in front of a senate subcommittee on financial services last Thursday.

According to DSNews, Secretary Geitner provided some details. "We are troubled by reports that servicers have foreclosed on potentially eligible homeowners, or that they have steered these borrowers away from HAMP and into the bank's own modification program," Geithner said. "That they have lost documentation, or claimed to. That they are not responding to the needs of responsible and increasingly desperate homeowners. None of this is acceptable."

If any of this is news to Secretary Geitner, it is only because Treasury elected not to have a sit-down with some of the real estate professionals who have been diligently working with homeowners to get servicers to approve short sales over the past few years.  Lost documents and unresponsiveness on requests for file updates is only a couple of challenges agents encounter daily when trying to work with mortgage servicers.

It's Time to Name Names

A clearly frustrated Geitner is apparently prepared to swing his public relations hammer, and poorly performing servicers might want to look for cover.  Treasury staff is already in the process of reviewing servicer performance data, presumably through Freddie Mac, the Treasury appointed compliance agent on Making Home Affordable programs, and Treasury does not intend to keep the results to themselves.

"We will soon publish much more detailed data on the performance of servicers to hold them accountable to the public - so that both members of Congress and the homeowners in your communities can assess for themselves the performance of these servicers," Geithner said.

 

Stay tuned.  It could get interesting.

Posted by

PartnerFirst
Nationwide Real Estate Network
www.partnerfirst.org/members


 

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