Maybe you bought a fixer-upper home because you’re handy.  Perhaps you’re good at paint, and know that a good coat of well-selected colors can brighten up any house and any room.

But if your mortgage is what needs fixing – perhaps you have to stop a loan foreclosure – it’s not a weekend project for non-professionals. A difficult, distressed mortgage is the work for professionals, people with the right training and expertise.

First, most people don’t know they can hire an intermediary to work with their mortgage lender. You can — they’re called loan modification specialists. Of course most of us deal with someone in a phone bank to discuss late payments, difficulties, current interest rates, etc., but when you’re trying to recast the terms of your mortgage, you need to talk to someone at a higher level.  Who, and how do you get there? Once you get someone on the phone, how do you get and keep their attention? The average bank home loan officer has 700 cases to work on. They need to be dealt with in a professional, cut-to-the-quick way.

Loan modification intermediaries know lenders – many of them were bankers themselves in the past. Others are real estate and finance attorneys, applying their expertise to your financial and housing well being. When they take on a case, they do so with more than 90 percent confidence they will succeed (they’ll ask preliminary questions to ferret out if your case can be made convincingly). Then they approach your mortgage bank with background knowledge on the bank itself — how expensive would it be for the bank to foreclose on your property? And under what terms, more favorable now to the homeowner, will the lender agree to adjusting the mortgage? It’s a matter of dollars and cents, but it’s also about knowing what to say and to whom.

If you engage a loan modification professional, your chances are greater that you’ll stay in your home — and be able to continue those Do-It-Yourself projects that ultimately add value to the home.