Mortgage Modification -- the "Good" and "Bad" Lenders -- January 2010 Edition

(MoneyWatch)  The newest report on loan modifications -- a January report based on December data -- came out last week, and it's at least a little better. As of a month ago, 31,382 permanent modifications had taken place; now that's more than doubled, to 66,000, with another 46,000 wrapped up and ready for the borrowers to sign, according to the Treasury Department.

The only problem is, there's at least 3 million left to go.

To try to embarrass bankers into moving faster, every month when the modification statistics come out, we report what percentage of eligible loans are being modified, sorted by bank.

The December grades came out -- in a report formally titled the "Making Home Affordable Program Servicer Performance Report through December 2009." (This mouthful is often called "HAMP" for short).

Notable here is that J.P. Morgan Chase jumped into the top five modifiers by putting at least 36 percent of its eligible loans into at least a trial modification; CitiMortgage took the top spot by pushing up to 47 percent. As institutions get the hang of it, there are now ten servicers that have modified at least 30 percent of their eligible 60-day delinquent loans. That Top Ten list notably includes PNC Bank, which made our "HAMP Horrors" list (indicating no loans modified) as recently as July.

What follows here is this month's Top Ten (and Bottom Five):

HAMP Heroes

1. Citimortgage, O'Fallon, Missouri (47%)
2. Saxon Mortgage Services, Irving, Texas (46%)
3. GMAC Mortgage, Fort Washington, Pennsylvania (44%)
4. JP Morgan Chase, New York, New York (36%)
5. Select Portfolio Servicing, Salt Lake City, Utah (35%)
6. Aurora Loan Services, Littleton, Colorado (34%)
7. Wells Fargo Bank, San Francisco, California (34%)
8. Bayview Loan Servicing, Coral Gables, Florida (34%)
9. Green Tree Servicing LLC, St. Paul, Minnesota (31%)
10. PNC Mortgage, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (30%)

HAMP "Hardly" (less than ten percent of loans modified)

1. Franklin Credit Management Corporation, Jersey City, New Jersey (0 percent of loans modified)
2. Wachovia Mortgage, FSB, North Las Vegas, Nevada
3. HomeEq Servicing, Sacramento, California
4. Carrington Mortgage Services LLC, Santa Ana, California
5. American Home Mortgage Servicing, Columbia, Maryland

Read More:

• Loan Modification Judge Blasts "Bad" Bank, Forgives Mortgage
• Mortgage Modification -- the "Good" and "Bad" Lenders -- December 2009 edition
• Mortgage Modification -- the "Good" and "Bad" Lenders -- November 2009 edition
• Three Million Mortgages Still Need to be Modified