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“HARP Mortgage Lender, a national Internet network of pre-approved loan specialists qualified to deal in the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP), reports that recent government figures see Florida borrowers using more HARP loans for deeply underwater borrowers than any state in the nation—a clear signal that updates made to the program, now known as HARP 2.0, have succeeded in bringing its streamlined refinancing to the people it was originally intended for, and that the Fannie Mae-reported annual savings of more than $4,300 per Florida HARP borrower should only continue to spread due to a recent two-year extension to HARP 2.0.
The June 12, 2013 Refinance Report from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) shows Florida surpassing California as the all-time leader in HARP loans in terms of borrowers with loan-to-value ratios (LTV’s) of more than 125 percent. Of Florida’s 12,423 HARP loans in March, 5,094 of those (or 41 percent) went to borrowers with above-125 LTV’s. That ratio of refinances to deeply underwater borrowers was almost double the nation’s rate of 22 percent for the same month, and in seeing such a groundswell of recent users, Florida trumped California’s total of 66,719 HARP loans to borrowers with above-125 LTV’s in the program’s history by ending the month with a nation-leading number of 67,083.
What’s perhaps most significant about these numbers is that they reflect how HARP is working exactly as it was intended to: in areas where both property values and economic conditions have declined to the point that borrowers are in financial situations that would be untenable without the refinancing aid. Florida does, after all, lead the nation in foreclosure rates, according to the recent data from analytics company RealtyTrac, with 1 in every 302 Florida homes foreclosed on in May of 2013. While there’s no way of saying how many of the 5,094 HARP borrowers who received a Florida HARP refinance in March would have had to foreclose, chances are that in this particular state, the numbers would have been scary if it weren’t for this mortgage lifesaver.”
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