Philadelphia judges, advocates for borrowers, and attorneys for lenders have developed a pilot program they hope will slash the number of mortgage-foreclosure sales in the city.
A key component is a timeline requiring mortgage companies to respond more quickly to proposals made by housing counselors on behalf of borrowers in default on their mortgage payments.
Details of the plan, called the “mortgage foreclosure diversion program,” were hammered out at three City Hall meetings over the last nine days and are scheduled for release tomorrow.
“We’re expecting good things to come out of this,” Common Pleas Court President Judge C. Darnell Jones II said today. “It’s extraordinary,” Jones said of the effort all parties put into the plan. The court oversees foreclosure proceedings in the city.
Regularly scheduled sheriff’s sales of investor-owned and vacant properties will resume next month after a one-month hiatus.
For owner-occupied properties, a “conciliation conference” between the borrower, an advocate for the borrower, and an advocate for the lender will take place 45 days after the foreclosure filing.
Under the plan, foreclosed properties occupied by the owners – representing 80 percent of foreclosures – will be diverted to a different track from vacant and investor-owned properties. The procedure will apply to all mortgages, not just subprime loans, which are at the heart of the national spike in foreclosures.
Homeowners must meet with a housing counselor at least five days before the conference to complete a proposal to deal with the mortgage default.
Philadelphia Sheriff John D. Green stayed April’s foreclosure sales after City Council passed a resolution March 27 calling for a moratorium.
On July 1, sheriff’s sales of owner-occupied properties that could not be saved by the conciliation process are expected to resume. If homeowners do not respond to notices or do not appear at their scheduled conciliation conferences, the lender may proceed with the foreclosures.
A sticking point between advocates for lenders and advocates for homeowners remains whether there should be an affordability standard for resolving a default.
There would have been exceptions to that – for example, if the lender could show that excessive credit card debt was the reason the borrower could not afford the mortgage, said Ian Phillips, Pennsylvania legislative director for the Association of Organizations for Reform Now, an advocacy group known as ACORN. The advocates still hope to win a standard.
Advocates for borrowers proposed a standard 45 percent ratio of debt payments to monthly income, so that defaulted borrowers receive the same deal no matter who represents them or who supervises their conciliation meeting.
Michael T. McKeever of Goldbeck, McCafferty & McKeever, a Philadelphia law firm that represents lenders in foreclosure proceedings, said lenders could not agree to the affordability standard.
“At this point, it’s not something that lenders can do freely,” he said, “because of their fiduciary duty to investors on the loan.”
Tags: borrower, foreclosed properties, Foreclosures, Philadelphia
