by Calculated Risk on 9/14/2020 04:00:00 PM

Note: This is as of September 6th.

From the MBA: Share of Mortgage Loans in Forbearance Declines to 7.01%

The Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) latest Forbearance and Call Volume Survey revealed that the total number of loans now in forbearance decreased by 15 basis points from 7.16% of servicers’ portfolio volume in the prior week to 7.01% as of September 6, 2020. According to MBA’s estimate, 3.5 million homeowners are in forbearance plans.
...
“The beginning of September brought another drop in the share of loans in forbearance, with declines in both GSE and Ginnie Mae forbearance shares. However, at least a portion of the decline in the Ginnie Mae share was due to servicers buying delinquent loans out of pools and placing them on their portfolios. As a result of this transfer, the share of portfolio loans in forbearance increased,” said Mike Fratantoni, MBA’s Senior Vice President and Chief Economist. “Forbearance requests increased over the week, particularly for Ginnie Mae loans. With just under 1 million unemployment insurance claims still being filed every week, the lack of additional fiscal support for the unemployed could lead to even higher increases of those needing forbearance.”

By stage, 33.69% of total loans in forbearance are in the initial forbearance plan stage, while 65.35% are in a forbearance extension. The remaining 0.96% are forbearance re-entries.
emphasis added

Click on graph for larger image.

This graph shows the percent of portfolio in forbearance by investor type over time.  Most of the increase was in late March and early April, and has been trending down for the last ten weeks.

The MBA notes: "Total weekly forbearance requests as a percent of servicing portfolio volume (#) increased relative to the prior week: from 0.09% to 0.11%."

There hasn't been a pickup in forbearance activity related to the end of the extra unemployment benefits.