The Neighborhood Watch Early Warning System (Neighborhood Watch) is a secure web-based application designed to provide comprehensive data querying, reporting and analysis capabilities for tracking the performance of loans originated, underwritten, and serviced by FHA-approved lending institutions. Neighborhood Watch is used by FHA employees, lending institutions and the general public to monitor the performance of insured mortgage loans by highlighting instances of high defaults and claims among lending institutions by geographic area, loan characteristic, and other factors. This is accomplished by developing compare ratios to identify lenders within various geographic areas (from zip code up to the national level) that exhibit a higher level of risk to the FHA insurance fund than other institutions due to excessive default and claim rates on endorsed loans with a beginning date of amortization within the previous 12 or 24 months from analysis.
The system provides a critical component for FHA’s risk management strategy by allowing for predictive analysis to be performed on lending institutions based on observed trends in the number of defaults and claims over time, among geographic areas, and across product types. Neighborhood Watch also allows for analysis to be carried out on the nature of the delinquencies that are reported to FHA by its servicers, the period of the mortgage lifecycle in which those delinquencies took place and the success rate of loss mitigation actions in bringing mortgagors current. Both of these capabilities better position FHA to manage current and future risk to its insurance funds by providing the means for evaluating the causes for delinquencies and for assisting lenders develop effective remedies/improved origination and underwriting practices, thereby preventing unnecessary foreclosures and costly conveyance claim payments.
The Neighborhood Watch system has an extensive Help feature. Please review the help menu before attempting to operate the system.
There are two ways to access Neighborhood Watch. First, through the Public Site, which provides general information accessible by anyone in the general public. It does not provide access to loan-level data.
The second way is to select Neighborhood Watch on the lenders main page at www.hud.gov/lenders to access the Lenders View. Because this option provides access to granular data at a loan level, access to this option is limited to employees of the querying institution and requires a user ID and password issued by HUD.
Return to the Lenders Home Page.