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Loan Modification And Refinancing - Mortgage Companies Slow In Coping Growing Request

It was in March 4, 2009 when the Obama administration announced the details of their Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan. Since then, lenders like the JPMorgan Chase and Company particularly in their home lending unit had received a doubled amount of phone calls. JPMorgan is known to be the fourth biggest mortgage servicer in the United States.

With the president’s desire to bring the economy back to life, he asked for the bank’s help by allowing around 5 million homeowners to refinance their home loans and modify the mortgages to 4 million more who do not qualify for refinancing. Because of this, lenders received large amount of calls from their customers and missed with an estimated 750, 000 calls per month.

According to the chief executive officer of Inside Mortgage Finance - Guy Cecala, homeowners will definitely be surprised with the mortgage company’s slow implementation with the administration’s programs. This is because many of them have reduces their staff by 44 percent when the housing bubble burst, thus they do not have enough work force to cater all those calls that they received.

According to Thomas Kelly, the spokesperson of JPMorgan, the growth in demand is beyond their expectations. They have hired 300 more employees to their mortgage modification group.

The American Home Mortgage Servicing on the other hand has work hard and tried to keep their lines open to its customers according to Christine Sullivan the spokeswoman for their Irving office. She further said that just like any other mortgage servicers, they too are experiencing a massive number of calls. This year, American Home Mortgage have added 650 employees and closed 6,500 loan modifications in March.

The Bank of America that acquired the Countrywide Financial Corp also has added their loan servicing staff from 1,500 in the last two years to 6,000 this year said spokeswoman Jumana Bauwens.