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71 "Everyone is trying to do the right thing, and they're acting very, very quickly—but then they're also changing very, very quickly. So, it's critical to keep up with the mandates but you have to accept that those can change frequently during these unfamiliar times." —Linda Erkkila, General Counsel, Safeguard Properties relocate out of flood zones. As remote work becomes more common, you may see folks start to move away from the cities in which the physical companies are based into areas that are deemed less 'risky.' at could be telling." However, in general, there's also been a trend among Americans toward warmer climates and more coastal areas—regions which bring some inherent risks when it comes to natural disasters. "As people shift toward those coasts and those areas that are easily impacted by natural disasters, it puts more people in the path," Rath said. A NEW KIND OF CRISIS e impact of COVID-19 has been felt far and wide across all parts of the American economy and way of life. At the end of May, Black Knight reported that the national delinquency rate experienced its highest single- month increase in history in April. Some 3.6 million homeowners were past due on their mortgages as of the end of April (including the roughly 211,000 who were in active foreclosure)—the highest number since January 2015. e national delinquency rate nearly doubled to 6.45% from March, the largest single-month increase ever recorded, and nearly three times the previous record for a single month from back in late 2008. According to Black Knight data, close to 9% of all active mortgage loans were in some form of forbearance as of the week of May 15. is amounted to a total of 4.7 million homeowners, up from 4.5 million loans reported the week prior. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate for the week ending May 9 was 17.2%. "We understand more than ever that these types of issues are not necessarily preventable nor the customer's fault," Rushmore's Terry Smith said. "When these types of situations arise, it's important to understand the needs of the customer and to work with them to get their situation corrected. It also helps to understand that the needs of our own workforce need to be accounted for, as many of us are impacted in the same way as our customers." Smith told DS News that, operationally, he believes that the industry's COVID-19 response has been simpler from a preservation perspective than with some natural disasters, "as the ordering, tracking of Inspections, and MSP flagging of the loan has become a very efficient and fast process." "is is uncharted territory," Greenbaum said. "Nobody has any idea how long or to what extent it will last, so there's definitely an information gap. A lot of what we've tried to do is to just talk to the right people and then pass that information along to our clients." According to the Safeguard team, one of the first things they did in March was to host critical discussions with investors and agencies to try and get a feel for their expectations of what was to come. Another critical question during those early days for property preservation in particular: would this sector fall under the category of "essential services?" "Is it okay to continue to do your job every single day?" Greenbaum asked. "at was one [area] where we were pretty aggressive in understanding our position we could communicate with our contractors and our inspectors." ere were lessons to be applied from both past natural disasters and the 2008 financial crisis, but one key difference came down to the simple matter of scale. "We've built solid gameplans for disaster response in certain regions, for certain types of disasters," Jaffa said. "But how do you manage that when it's the entire country?" Greenbaum said that most of the Safeguard leadership team had been in place during the previous housing crisis, so "we all knew the need to be able to expand quickly." is led to Safeguard's strategy of maintaining a broad network of vendors, rather than concentrating a lot of volume on only a handful of vendors. "We always attempt to work with local vendors with boots on the ground for redundancy reasons, but also scalability reasons," Greenbaum said.

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