How large? The number of active plans dropped by 228,000 from last Tuesday, a 9% drop in a single week. However, this drop is is not unexpected. The decline is largely driven by early forbearance entrants exiting their plans at the 12-month mark (and what would have been their final expiration prior to extensions).

 The improvement was widespread, with all investor classes seeing significant declines in active forbearances. FHA/VA led the way, with its active forbearance plans falling by 94,000, followed by 69,000 and 65,000 declines in GSE and portfolio/PLS plan forbearances, respectively. 

An estimated 280,000 homeowners exited forbearance this week, representing more than half of all loans being reviewed for extension and removal. For context, as recently as last week, roughly 8 in 10 plans reviewed for extension/removal activity resulted in the extension of forbearance.

Inflow also continues to improve, with an estimated 158,000 such starts (including re-starts) over the past four weeks. That’s down 18% from the preceding 4-week period. In total, this puts the number of active plans down by 323,000 over the last month, a 12.3% reduction and the strongest rate of improvement since early November. It also puts us down 2.45 million (-51%) from the peak.

As of April 6, 2.3 million homeowners remain in forbearance, representing 4.4% of all homeowners with mortgages. And with another 500,000 plans with April month-end expirations, the possibility remains for further improvement through this month and into May.