Data on first-lien residential mortgage loans serviced by seven national banks with large mortgage-servicing portfolios shows a 0.1% improvement in the loans’ fourth-quarter performance from 2023 to 2024, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) said Monday.
The report includes 20.2% of all residential mortgage debt outstanding in the United States, or about 11.1 million loans totaling $2.7 trillion in principal balances, the agency said. These include first-lien mortgages serviced by Bank of America, Citibank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, PNC, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo, it said.
The OCC’s Q4 2024 Mortgage Metrics Report shows 97.3% of the mortgages were current and performing at the end of the quarter, up from 97.2% one year earlier. (That is down 0.1%, however, from the third quarter of 2024.)
The report shows that the number of seriously delinquent mortgages – those 60 or more days past due and all of those held by bankrupt borrowers whose payments are 30 or more days past due – rose from 122,000 in the third quarter to 127,000 in the fourth quarter, but were down from 136,000 in the fourth quarter one year ago.
The report also shows, that during Q4 2024:
- Servicers initiated 6,647 new foreclosures, down from 8,320 in the same period one year earlier.
- There were 1,398 home forfeiture actions, down 515, or 26.9%, from 1,913 one year earlier. These include completed foreclosure sales, short sales, and deed-in-lieu-of-foreclosure actions.
- Servicers completed 7,332 modifications, a 1.6% decrease from 7,450 one quarter earlier. Of these 6,872, or 93.7%, were “combination modifications” – those including multiple actions affecting the affordability and sustainability of the loan, such as an interest rate reduction and a term extension.