As the song goes "what a difference a day makes." On Wednesday President Obama unveiled his $275 billion housing plan to help stem the tide of foreclosures. By the next day, mortgage lenders' phones were ringing off the hook. Lending Tree, the online mortgage lender had the highest loan request volume day for the month. Traffic at Zillow.com was up 56% on Wednesday.
While the program announced on Wednesday will help the foreclosure problem, it does not contain a provision for servicers to modify mortgages. Professor Chris Mayer, senior vice dean at Columbia University said that 50% of mortgage servicers have some kind of restriction on loan modification which can only be changed through legislation.
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