Posted by Stamper_WI on 12/27/07 8:22pm
Msg #227872

What Mortgage lenders should be doing

I thought the following was a good article


"As the mortgage crisis rolls along, I’ve been surprised at the relative lack of positive PR from the mortgage industry. Maybe they are just too busy righting their ships to worry about PR, but it seems to me that they ought to have been out there with some positive messages about a) what they are doing to help homeowners and b) what good they have done generally.

In the absence of any big PR push, they’re coming across like old Mr. Potter, the penny-pinching banker, in It’s A Wonderful Life. You know: the savings and loan official who nearly ruins Christmas by foreclosing on everyone’s homes. See the connection to this time of year?

I know one family at the edge of losing their house next year, when their mortgage interest rate resets to a higher level, meaning their monthly mortgage expense will go up by hundreds of dollars. They don’t think they can come up with the cash every month and are expecting to lose their home. I saw them this Christmas, and their faces are lined with worry — just like Jimmy Stewart’s in the movie.

Have we progressed so little as a society and economy that we don’t have better answers to the mortgage crisis than were available during the 1930s and 40s?

I’m not an expert in mortgage finance, so I’m not going to offer financial suggestions for how to keep people in their homes. But here are some of the things mortgage lenders as an industry could have been doing this Christmas to improve their PR:

Highlight in the media and elsewhere what they are doing, in detail, to keep as many people in their homes as possible
Institute stop-gap programs so that people who have to give up their homes have money or other resources to ease them into rental housing
Announce new lending programs and practices that reassure the country that they have learned their lesson and won’t extend mortgages to people who can’t afford them
Engage in employee civic involvement with Habitat for Humanity or other organizations to demonstrate their compassion
Make targeted donations to organizations fighting poverty, homelessness and housing injustice
None of this would cause people to forget about the mortgage crisis. But it would go a long way toward distancing the industry from the image of Mr. Potter."