PHH Mortgage says its servicing department never used so called "robo-signers" to process foreclosures, as some of its rivals did.
"We're just not processing the kind of volume like our competition," PHH's chief executive, Jerry Selitto, said in an interview. "People are not signing hundreds of affidavits a day. That's just not the workload that we have in our shop."
After receiving several inquires about its foreclosure processes, including from regulators, PHH, of Mount Laurel, N.J., did review its procedures and determined not to impose a foreclosure moratorium.
However, the company has tweaked its processes "in an abundance of caution," said Luke Hayden, head of PHH's mortgage unit, in an interview.
"We are not refiling any paperwork," he said. "It really comes down to literally printing off screenshots of the file information from the system and sticking it in the mortgage loan file so we can be clear that the affidavit is correctly reflecting the information from the system."
PHH said roughly 1.7% of the first mortgages it services are in foreclosure, totaling fewer than 17,000 loans. About 60% of those loans are concentrated in states where foreclosures are handled by the courts, Hayden said.
Borrowers in foreclosure are, on average, more than 12 months behind on payments.
