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57 What sort of lessons have you taken away from the COVID-19 crisis? What can it teach us about preparing for future situations? COVID-19 was something no one in our lifetime had seen unless you happened to be around for the 1918 Spanish Flu. For our part, we quickly figured out that it was not going to be business as usual—even for relatively simple things like appraisals, like closings. Nobody wanted to be around anyone; they certainly didn't want to have some stranger come into their house and start poking around and doing an appraisal. So we needed to make some quick changes. We had fantastic help from the market, from consumer advocates, from low-income housing advocates. e Hill was reaching out to us every day about what they could do and the best way to do it. For a while, everybody was working together. Look how quickly they got the CARES Act out. We gave borrowers the year, and then later up to six more months, just to hit the pause button on their mortgage. We're coming up on the end of those 18 months, and you still have a lot of borrowers in forbearance—over one million of them are FHA borrowers. I'm confident FHA will rise to the occasion, working with servicers and trying to provide a soft landing for many of those 1.2 million borrowers, whether it's a partial claim, some other traditional loss mitigation assistance, interest rate reduction, or loan mod. But a lot of those borrowers still aren't on their feet, and as you know, to really be successful in a loan mod or loss mitigation, you must have income coming in. So, that's going to be where it's going to get tricky. Many of the servicers, they've been helping borrowers come out of forbearance already, but when this 18-month period expires, it's going to be something of a tidal wave of borrowers coming out of forbearance seeking more assistance if they haven't already. You've joked in the past about how one of your priorities at FHA was trying to bring its technology into the late 1990s. How do you feel about what you were able to accomplish on that front? When I was Commissioner the first time, I remember trying to get money for some much-needed IT improvements at FHA. But, of course, we never got it. My successors did the same thing, David Stevens and Carol Galante. ey had some success getting some funding, but nothing to completely re-do FHA's IT infrastructure. Coming out of the government shutdown in 2019, much to our surprise, Congress said, "We're going to give you that down payment "I'm confident FHA will rise to the occasion, working with servicers and trying to provide a soft landing for many of those 1.2 million borrowers."

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