Home Loan Assistance Programs from the Top 5 Mortgage Lenders

Published by julia | Filed under Buyer / Seller Tips, Market Trends, Miscellaneous, Pinellas County Homes, Real Estate

Mortgage rates and terms are typically the top factors influencing the choice of a lender. However, you may want to look into how lenders are helping customers, so you can make the best choice.

Since the bulk of residential mortgages in the country are held by the top 5 mortgage lenders, it is their programs that we will look into. Since 2008, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, GMAC and Citigroup have been writing the majority of home loans in the country.

In the fourth quarter last year, the top 5 lenders accounted for 66 percent of the total dollar value of all home loans originated. They also made up a whopping 74 percent of the total home loan servicing market, based on data published by mortgagestats.com.

Mortgage customer services

If you visit the websites of these 5 lenders, you’ll see similar services to their customers: mortgage calculators, online chats with loan officers, how-to guides and online application accounts.

Three of them promise to provide you a form similar to the Good Faith Estimate of the HUD. BofA has its Clarity Commitment summary, Wells Fargo trademarked its form Wells Fargo Closing Guarantee and CitiMortgage created its Guarantee Rate Lock.

JPMorganChase currently stands out as it has its 1% Mortgage Cash Back program, which even has a pending patent. The monthly cashback equals one percent of the monthly principal and interest payment of the newly approved loan or refinanced loan. Chase will either deposit the cashback into the borrower’s checking account or apply the annual total to the outstanding principal balance.

To qualify, you need to have a new or existing personal checking account with Chase and you need to enroll your loan into the Chase automatic loan payment service. The annual cashback is capped to $500 and is offered in 23 states only.

HAMP performance

You may also want to see how these top 5 banks are helping distressed homeowners under the Home Affordable Modification Program. Based on the most recent HAMP report from the Treasury Department, the top 5 lenders had the highest number of permanent modifications. This is expected as they made the most mortgage loans and consequently had the highest number of delinquent loans eligible for HAMP.

Of the more than 1.7 million eligible delinquent loans as of March 31, BofA accounted for 28 percent; Chase, 14.5 percent; Wells Fargo, 10.3 percent; CitiMortgage, 9 percent; and GMAC, 1.4 percent.

In April, GMAC performed the best, as it posted a conversion rate of 59 percent – the pace of conversion from trial to permanent modification. BofA and Wells Fargo both posted 25 percent, Chase converted 22 percent and CitiMortgage posted 21 percent.

One factor, however, for the lower conversion rates of the other four was that they did not use verified income documents before they put mortgages into trial modification.

On the whole, to get the best mortgage loan, choose lenders based on loan costs and how they treat customers.