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Proactive government and bank efforts to help distressed borrowers have largely, if not exclusively, been focused on ‘home retention’ programs in 2009. On the one hand this focus makes sense: the first question that should be asked and answered when a family stops making their mortgage payment due to financial hardship is whether an change to the loan terms would make the home affordable for the same borrower (thereby avoiding all the negative effects of a pre or post foreclosure home sale) while being acceptable to the investor.

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I had the privilege of participating on an exciting panel on the future of short sales at the REOMAC semi-annual conference in Palm Springs this week. REOMAC is the non-profit trade organization for REO industry participants – realtors, servicers, lenders, asset managers and other service providers –who focus on the (tough) job of helping Banks manage and sell properties they have acquired through the foreclosure process.

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I am pleased to see the Obama administration attempting – much more aggressively than the Bush administration ever did – to help (3-4 million) at-risk homeowners stay in their homes through a variety of loan modification initiatives and incentives which are designed to lower the at-risk homeowners’ payments to levels they can afford to sustain going forward. Creative and aggressive loan modifications are absolutely a critical part of any well designed foreclosure prevention and housing market stabilization program, and the Obama team’s plan included 2 additional elements I liked:

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Please find below a brief proposal I have put together on the issue of foreclosure prevention and housing market stabilization based on what I and the team at HausAngeles as well as our colleagues, clients and strategic partners are actually seeing (and not seeing) on the ground in Los Angeles/Southern California. I and we do not claim to have all the answers on this “massive issue”. Nor do we claim all of the ideas below are mine or ours (please see footnote 1: acknowledgements). However, refining and executing on some or all of these ideas will be a key focus for me and the team at HausAngeles for the foreseeable future and until the housing market stabilizes. Our primary geographic focus is Los Angeles, but we plan to share learnings and information widely and freely to maximize impact at the ground level.

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There is widespread agreement among key national political, economic and housing stakeholders (the government and regulators, consumers and Banks among others) on the need to help prevent foreclosures, keep as many people as possible in their homes, and “clear the housing market” of troubled assets quickly and fairly. This would help the housing market find a bottom more quickly - which housing market bottom will mark a turning point in our nations’ economic recovery.

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