Although everyone is focused on the latest confusing unemployment report today, another monthly report was also released by the government: its March update on the Obama administration's mortgage modification program. "HAMP" largely followed the same path it's been on for eight or so months now. New trial modifications continue to come in at a trickle, while permanent modifications rose a bit.
Here's the key chart, showing the program's month-to-month performance over the two years it's been around:
The month's tally of 22,000 new trial modifications matches the program's monthly low. But its 36,432 modifications made permanent is the highest number since July. As servicers work through the aged trial modification population, however, the number of modifications that are made permanent each month will have to drop below the number of new trials, consistently coming in at around 27,000 per month.
Cancellations also continue to decline. There were about 12,000 this month, which is the fewest since the cancellations began to soar as the program cracked down on servicers that weren't processing modifications quickly enough in early 2010.
In fact, performance of the permanent modifications looks pretty good so far. The Treasury provides the following chart (click to enlarge):