ShoreBank Blog

The Real Community Impact of Mortage Modification

by Michelle on July 28th, 2009

ShoreBank is a community bank. Our roots are deep in our neighborhoods.  Our tellers know customers by name; our mortgage team knows the address of the home an applicant seeks to buy. Our customer relationships are often long-term and personal because our customers’ successes in business or in life benefit the community and not just the bank’s bottom line.

That is why the current economic situation is so personal to our team. We see firsthand the consequences of this economic crisis: closed businesses, unemployment, increased foreclosures and the threat of more.  Home loss is devastating to all involved. A home is not like a stock or a bond – it has a presence and it occupies a central place in the life of a community and a family.

We hear the stories behind what threatens home ownership personally from those who are threatened: two-income families lose both their jobs; a spouse or a child becomes sick and the medical bills become too great; an elderly customer’s surgery reduces the hours she can work on a 2nd job. We listen and then we work to ensure their mortgages are affordable in light of changes that have come from this difficult economic environment – to modify loans so that payments are sustainable for the long term.  Those modifications are critical to the continued health of our communities so we do everything we can to keep our customers in their homes.

Programs exist that can help people make their payments.  President Obama’s mortgage modification program does not cost the borrower anything and can re-set rates to as low as 2%.  ShoreBank has been implementing this new policy. Without it, many more people would have lost their homes.

We were able to modify our elderly customer’s mortgage, and mortgages for customers of many ages.  People who work in our lending department talk about customers crying when they get the good news, that the loan can be worked out, that they can stay in their home. But less often they talk about the personal impact it has on them.   One of our loan processors quietly recalled working with a woman who was signing her loan modification, “Tears were rolling from her eyes. She was so grateful to ShoreBank. She just broke down. I had to get up from there because I didn’t want her to see me crying.”  Personally helping customers is what is best for the community.  It’s what ShoreBank is all about.

Tags: community development, green banking, home affordability and stability plan, mortgage modification, ShoreBank, triple bottom line

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 and is filed under Mortgage Lending. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.