Housing Fizzles and Foreclosure Couseling Sizzles

Lisa Jarman, in Riverside, CA had this to say - In flush times, she was a selfemployed loan consultant for banks. Last fall she became a “foreclosure prevention counselor,” joining the homeownership meltdown’s latest spinoff industry.
“A tsunami has hit us,” said Jarman, 42, the first such counselor at the Fair Housing Council of Riverside County, located in the nation’s fourthworst area for home loan failures in 2007. She was hired in September and found more than 400 people lining up at one recent workshop instead wanting guidance on avoiding foreclosure, she said.
“It’s like using a teaspoon to dip the water out,” she said of the flood of homeowners whipsawed by falling market values and soaring adjustable-rate loan payments. The two-counselor office is about to increase by four, each paid about $40,000 a year, a supervisor said.
As an emerging niche that even has certification requirements, counselors like Jarman are the newest fighters on the foreclosure front. Their national ranks will expand by at least 2,800 this year, boosted by a $180 million training program approved by Congress in December, according to NeighborWorks America, a national nonprofit agency training the counselors.
The counselors extend a sympathetic ear as well as financial savvy in serving as the last hope between distressed homeowners and their unpaid lenders. After performing triage on a homeowner’s troubled finances for 90 minutes or longer, the counselors seek ways to save a household under a restructured loan or at least devise a stop-gap program.
Generally, counselors say they’re able to keep a third of their clients in their homes, an occasion that leads one adviser, Richard Pittman, to do “a happy dance” with each success.
“It is a very stressful job,” said Pittman, 54, of ByDesign-FinancialSolutions, a nonprofit agency. “If you’re spending most of your day listening to the misery that’s out there, that wears on people,” he said. “I’ve known (counselors) through the years who’ve had therapists.”
Counselors can’t do much when homeowners don’t want to sacrifice that second car or annual vacation, or take on a boarder or a second job, Pittman said.
“Some people say, ‘Are you kidding me? You want me to do that? I just want to keep my house,’ ” he said. “Those are the ones that are going to fail.”

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