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WASHINGTON – Today, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo and Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Adrianne Todman convened a roundtable with mortgage servicers to discuss best practices for coordinating with state-run programs funded by the American Rescue Plan’s Homeowner Assistance Fund (HAF). HAF provides close to $10 billion in financial support to help families weather financial hardship and remain in their homes. This is a critical source of support for struggling homeowners around the country as the economic impact of COVID-19 put millions of homeowners at risk of losing their homes.

Today’s gathering is the latest effort by the Biden-Harris Administration to ensure HAF funds are reaching the most at-risk homeowners. Last month, the Secretaries of the Treasury, HUD, Veterans Affairs, and Agriculture sent a letter to mortgage servicers of federally backed mortgages calling on them to make every effort to ensure no individual or family experiences unnecessary hardship or foreclosure while assistance is available under HAF. This builds on HUD’s actions to provide a wide variety of loss mitigation options for homeowners who receive FHA insurance and underscores the Administration’s continued commitment to coordinate among housing finance agencies, mortgage servicers, and borrowers to help homeowners keep their homes. In the roundtable conversation, mortgage servicers shared how they are working with states, territories, Tribes and Tribally Designated Housing Entities that are administering HAF programs to achieve this goal.

Roundtable participants discussed opportunities to ensure coordination between servicers and HAF programs to benefit homeowners such as identifying strategies to enhance communications and streamline processes so that programs can better serve HAF applicants. Facilitating communication between HAF programs and mortgage servicers to prioritize homeowners with immediate threats to housing stability can ensure that households do not unnecessarily face hardship or foreclosure. This is especially relevant as HAF programs across the country are working alongside other Administration relief efforts to deliver assistance to homeowners as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Roundtable participants included:

• American Bankers Association
• Freedom Mortgage
• Gateway Bank
• Housing Policy Council
• MidFirst Bank
• PHH Mortgage
• Rocket Mortgage
• Traditions Bank
• S. Bank
• Wells Fargo

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