March 15, 2006 — NeighborWorks member Neighborhood Housing Services of Great Falls and its statewide affiliate, the Montana Home Ownership Network, have created a statewide foreclosure program to assist families in sustaining the gain of homeownership. Each year, more than 800 Montana families lose their homes to foreclosure. National statistics indicate that half of the families facing foreclosure never make a single call for help. The Montana Foreclosure Prevention Program (MFPP) is designed to encourage those families to make one call – one call that may be able to save their homes.
A statewide advertising campaign is getting the foreclosure prevention information to homeowners across the state. Using a comforting female voice, the ads on all local television and AM radio stations encourage troubled homeowners to make just one call for help to avoid losing their homes.
Recently, Officer George Kynett of the Cascade County Sheriff’s Department saw one of the ads on television. As a civil service process server, he is often assigned the duty of delivering foreclosure legal notices to homeowners. He visited the NHS offices, asking for more information about the program, so he could deliver hope as well as the legal notice. The afternoon after Officer Kynett visit to NHS, homeowners he had contacted were already coming to NHS. Laura Bolstad, NHS housing counselor, immediately seeing the value of this method of delivering information about foreclosure prevention, sent the information to every sheriff’s department in the state, so they, too, could bring hope with their legal notices.
A key component of the MFPP is the use of the National Center for Foreclosure Prevention’s 24 hour a day hotline at 1-888-995-HOPE. Trained counselors are on-call at all times to take calls from troubled homeownership. Some of the callers can be helped with budgeting assistance to help them see the way to catch up on their past-due mortgage payments. Some homeowners require intervention with the lender or servicer of their loans to make arrangements to work-out the missing payments.
Those homeowners who require more intensive attention, such as a mortgage prevention loan, are referred back to Neighborhood Housing Services and the Montana HomeOwnership Network, who have trained counselors across the state. NHS can assist with a foreclosure prevention loan, assistance in selling the home to avoid losing equity or negotiating a “short sale” or “cash for keys” deal with the lender/servicer. A short sale is the agreement where the lender agrees to take less than the total amount due on the mortgage when the homeowner sells the home. Cash for keys means that lender agrees to take the house back and forgive the mortgage.
The program already has worked to keep homeowners from foreclosure. From December 2005 through February 2006, NHS made six foreclosure prevention loans to Montana homeowners.
