Countrywide to Help More Borrowers

Countrywide Financial Corp. said Monday that it will expand its existing programs to help borrowers with subprime loans who are struggling.
By: ALLEN P. ROBERTS Jr.: Los Angeles Business Journal Online
Countrywide said that the program is the culmination of a deal the Calabasas-based lender had reached with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, and calls for Countrywide to try to manage payment plans for borrowers who are already behind in payments, regardless of which type of subprime loan they have.

This is the second such program Countrywide has introduced. In October, the nation’s largest lender and mortgage loan servicer said it would work out repayment plans for borrowers in danger of foreclosure. The company said last month those actions helped more than 81,000 borrowers keep their mortgage payments manageable.

“Through this partnership, Countrywide and ACORN have agreed to a set of home retention standards to help borrowers who are in various situations of financial difficulty to establish suitable repayment plans or other solutions," Steve Bailey, Countrywide's senior managing director of loan administration, said in a statement.

Under the ACORN plan, borrowers with hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages, which typically were issued with a low interest rate that adjusts higher after two or three years, can be offered the option of refinancing into a lower-rate loan, or have their initial interest rate frozen for as much as five years.

“We hope others in the mortgage servicing industry will adopt similar practices,” Maude Hurd, national president of ACORN, said in a statement.

ACORN is the nation's largest community organization of low and moderate-income families in 80 cities across the country.

Shares in countrywide were up 6 cents to $6.64 in early trading Monday on the New York Stock Exchange.