NID Housing Counseling Agency (NID-HCA), which has operations in 22 states, has expanded its use of HOPE LoanPort in an effort to ramp up its assistance to at-risk homeowners. NID-HCA is now requiring that all of its affiliated counselors use HOPE LoanPort as the primary tool for submitting applications for home retention to participating mortgage servicers. Additionally, NID-HCS is enhancing and expanding its efforts to train counselors on the use of HOPE LoanPort.
NID-HCA has successfully used the HOPE LoanPort system to assist struggling homeowners for more than a year and has openly praised the Web portal as highly effective in reducing lost paperwork and producing faster decisions for its clients. To date, approximately six percent of all foreclosure prevention cases in the portal have been submitted by NID-HCA. This has been achieved with less than 50 percent participation of the 72 affiliates currently signed up to use HOPE LoanPort.
"We're excited to be expanding our partnership with NID-HCA and elated they are happy with the system; their candid feedback has been important in fine tuning its development," said Larry Gilmore, chief executive officer of HOPE LoanPort. "NID-HCA's requirement of all counselor affiliates using this system will significantly impact the number of homeowners receiving assistance and demonstrates their true commitment as a partner in promoting change. It's a win-win situation for housing counselors and for the homeowners they serve across the country."
NID-HCA stated that HOPE LoanPort has helped the organization in its mission to assist America's homeowners by:
►Creating accountability among mortgage servicers.
►Providing real-time status updates on pending applications in seven to 10 days.
►Decreasing turnaround times for applications to be underwritten.
►Allowing for easy tracking of homeowner applications.
►Ensuring that sensitive homeowner information is securely sent to one place.
"We believe that HOPE LoanPort is a vital, necessary, and most important, free utility for use by all housing counselors in our network," said Jacqueline Carlisle, executive director of NID-HCA. "It is perhaps the most complete Web-based loss mitigation tool currently available for bridging the gap between homeowners and mortgage servicers."
