Three U.S. Senators have sent letters to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac asking the home funding providers to offer six months of relief on mortgage payments to its Florida homeowners whose homes were built with defective Chinese drywall.
The requests from Sens. George LeMieux, R-Fla., Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Mary Landrieu, D-La., are in response to an announcement last week that Fannie Mae was offering six-month forbearances to about 20 Virginia families whose homes contain the tainted wallboard. Those forbearances would not be recorded as a flaw on the homeowners’ credit report, Fannie Mae said. In addition, the company said it would work to “develop a nationwide approach to addressing this issue.”
“I applaud your commitment to working with homeowners in Virginia and hope that the same relief will be extended to Floridians,” LeMieux wrote to Fannie Mae president and chief executive Michael J. Williams in a letter dated Wednesday.
“A six-month grace period can help folks struggling to keep their heads above water,” Nelson and Landrieu wrote in a separate letter addressed to Williams and to Charles E. Haldeman, chief executive of Freddie Mac.
Many homeowners whose homes contain defective drywall say that they would like to move out of their affected homes, but cannot afford their mortgage payments as well as rent on another place. Some have moved out and stopped making mortgage payments, while others are struggling to make both payments.
The lead U.S. federal agency investigating the issue has received 3,082 complaints from residents in 37 states, the District of Columbia, American Samoa, and Puerto Rico. The majority of those reports have come from Florida.
Source: Copyright © 2010 The Palm Beach Post, Fla. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment