At the end of January (1/29/29), the CFPB released their “Complaint snapshot: Mortgage” document. This report takes a deep dive into the mortgage-related complaints received by the Bureau and also highlights some trends that they have observed.
For those of you with large mortgage originations and portfolios (which is almost every financial institution), this information can be extremely valuable for two reasons. First, this information can be incorporated into your risk assessment process when you are both looking for mortgage-related trends as well as your history related to areas identified as being common for complaints. Secondly, this information can be used pro-actively as part of your compliance management system (CMS) where is can be used in your own complaint management, training efforts, and audit and monitoring efforts.
Highlights of this report include the following:
Between November 1, 2016 and October 31, 2018, approximately 11 percent of complaints were about mortgages.
Most mortgage complaints were about “trouble during payment process” (42 percent) and “struggling to pay mortgage” (36 percent).
Compared to the monthly average during the past 24 months, people submitted 18 percent fewer mortgage complaints in October 2018.
There were 15 percent fewer mortgage complaints from August 2018 to October 2018 compared to August 2017 to October 2017.
While this report has a specific focus on mortgage complaints, it also contains data on all complaints received by the CFPB. For those of you responsible for your compliance risk assessments or CMS, this report provides some great data about both the products for which complaints have been received as well as geographic trends, such as states that have had increases and decreases in complaints.
The CFPB’s “Complaint snapshot: Mortgage” can be found here.