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More than 3.4M Homeowners – 6.4% of all Mortgages – Now in COVID-19-Related Forbearance Plans

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  • The McDash Flash suite from Black Knight leverages daily, loan-level data to provide market participants with the most current view of the forbearance and mortgage performance landscape
  • According to the McDash Flash Forbearance Tracker, as of April 23, 2020, more than 3.4 million homeowners – or 6.4% of all mortgages – have entered into COVID-19 mortgage forbearance plans
  • This population represents $754 billion in unpaid principal and includes 5.6% of all GSE-backed loans and 8.9% of all FHA/VA loans
  • At today’s level, mortgage servicers are bound to advance $2.8 billion of principal and interest payments per month to holders of government-backed securities on COVID-19-related forbearances
  • Another $1.3 billion per month in lost funds is faced by those with portfolio-held or privately securitized mortgages
  • Given FHFA’s recently announced four-month limit on advance obligations, servicers of GSE-backed mortgages could still face more than $7 billion in advances based on the number of forbearance plans thus far

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – April 24, 2020 – In light of the significant impacts the  COVID-19 pandemic is having on the U.S. mortgage market, Black Knight, Inc. (NYSE:BKI) has been tracking loan-level forbearance data on a daily basis through its newly introduced McDash Flash data set, and is publicly reporting high-level data points on a weekly basis. According to Black Knight CEO Anthony Jabbour, the recent Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announcement of a four-month limit on advance obligations for servicers of mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provides the industry with some much-needed clarity.

“Having a four-month end date on the period in which servicers need to advance principal and interest payments on behalf of homeowners in forbearance is extremely helpful to our servicing clients,” said Jabbour. “Still, even knowing that time limit, with today’s number of forbearance plans, servicers are still looking at more than $7 billion dollars in advances over those four months. And the forbearance numbers are climbing steadily, day by day. Clearly, this remains a challenging situation all around.”

Leveraging Black Knight’s extensive data assets and proprietary analytics, the company has launched a suite of McDash Flash solutions based on daily loan-level mortgage data, with insights delivered in multiple forms to meet specific client needs and budgets. Solutions include the daily Forbearance Tracker that lets market participants review general forbearance trends, model short-term outcomes and plan for reserves as well as the interactive business intelligence (BI) of the McDash Flash Forbearance monitor, where clients can access forbearance-specific information customized for servicer benchmarking. For more granular and actionable insight, customized aggregate data sets are available sorted by investor, vintage, geography and other criteria that allow clients to benchmark their performance against the industry and get metrics on short-term vector forecasts presenting expected future performance.

Additionally, the full McDash Flash Loan-Level Daily Performance Data Set is available via Black Knight’s Rapid Analytics Platform (RAP), which, combined with other RAP components, lets users easily survey millions of records to observe the impact of forbearance – on a daily basis – and identify trends down to the county, ZIP and even neighborhood level. Clients can easily incorporate supplementary datasets based on public information, as it becomes available, to develop further insights that serve a multitude of use cases.

With dramatic increases in unemployment, delinquencies and defaults can be expected to increase for the foreseeable future, even during forbearance. McDash Flash provides daily visibility into delinquency and default trends. Using McDash Flash will help servicers anticipate surges in delinquencies and prepare operationally for loss mitigation activities.

“From the start of the COVID-19 crisis, Black Knight has sought to provide leadership on behalf of our clients, as well as provide them with clarity, actionable intelligence and knowledgeable assistance,” Jabbour added. “Beyond that, no other company has the sort of holistic view of the mortgage market and related industries that Black Knight has. We’ve been able to see – and quantify – what this situation means for our clients, the industry and the wider U.S. economy, and we have been actively sharing and innovating around that insight.”

Like McDash Primary data, McDash Flash data is anonymous and does not contain any nonpublic personal information (NPI) or personally identifiable information (PII), but can be benchmarked and/or extrapolated up for a full-market picture.

As of April 23, 2020, the McDash Flash Forbearance Tracker found the following:

Much more detail on the impact of COVID-19 on the mortgage and real estate industries, as well as challenges and solutions relevant to individual market segments, can be found in Black Knight’s special white paper, available to download for free at this link. Moving forward, Black Knight will continue to provide weekly McDash Flash Forbearance Tracker updates via Vision, the Black Knight blog. Those interested in staying up-to-date on industry developments are encouraged to visit the blog for more information in the coming days and weeks.

About Black Knight

Black Knight (NYSE: BKI) is a leading provider of integrated software, data and analytics solutions that facilitate and automate many of the business processes across the homeownership lifecycle.

As a leading fintech, Black Knight is committed to being a premier business partner that clients rely on to achieve their strategic goals, realize greater success and better serve their customers by delivering best-in-class software, services and insights with a relentless commitment to excellence, innovation, integrity and leadership. For more information on Black Knight, please visit www.blackknightinc.com.

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