You're Invited . . . To Pay Your Mortgage

But the lenders said they were trying to change the perception that they're difficult to work with. They are testing new approaches for reaching homeowners like Janet Stark, who fell behind on her mortgage payments last year after her interest rate increased and her monthly bill rose from about $700 to $1,100. She initially tried to reach her lender but found the maze of voice mails and transfers daunting.

"Thinking you are going to lose [your home], you want to hide under the bed," said Stark, a cashier at a gas station in Minneapolis.

As Stark fell three months behind, she began getting calls six times a day. "It was horrible. They kept calling and calling. You don't have to answer the phone, but you know who it is," said Stark, a married mother of three. "We were really suffering. I didn't know where to turn."

Late last year, Stark received a letter from Acorn, the counseling agency. Within a month, she said, her interest rate and payments were lowered. The missed payments were added to her mortgage total.

Wells Fargo estimated that it had no contact with about 30 percent of delinquent homeowners who went into foreclosure in 2006. Last year, it began testing envelopes in bold or unusual colors or resembling wedding invitations.

Last month, it began experimenting with offering $250 gift cards to delinquent borrowers who had been unreachable, said Joe Ohayon, a Wells Fargo vice president.

Other lenders are focusing on building relationships with community groups. While borrowers typically respond to 3 to 5 percent of the letters sent out by lenders, they respond to about a quarter of those from such grass-roots groups, according to the Hope Now Alliance, a nonprofit organization funded by mortgage lenders.

Sometimes just using a community group's name is enough: Chase, which services $600 billion in loans, sends letters on Acorn letterhead and pays the group to leave its door hangers at the homes of borrowers it has not reached otherwise. When Ocwen, a subprime servicer, reached out to borrowers on Hope Now letterhead in December, it had a 15 percent response rate.

"That compares extremely well to the response rate from other mailings," said William Rinehart, an Ocwen vice president.

But even community groups need to approach homeowners gingerly. The Consumer Credit Counseling Service of San Francisco, under an agreement with Freddie Mac, first sends a letter offering help but usually gets only about a 5 percent response. These borrowers are probably bombarded with questionable offers of help and do not know which to trust, said Rick Harper, the group's director of housing.

Five days later, the nonprofit begins a series of at least three calls, trying to reach the homeowner at different times and on the weekend, Harper said. "We let them know the lender doesn't want your house," he said. Last year, the group was able to reach about 22 percent of targeted borrowers.

But when the program began, the counseling service first had to convince its wary employees that they were not acting as debt collectors. "We're not asking for money; we're asking if they want to keep their home," Harper said.

Some lenders pay nonprofits to go door to door. Countrywide first hired Acorn for that work in 2005 when it needed help finding homeowners displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Acorn found about 70 percent of those it sought, some of whom were sitting on their porch but had no phone service, Shea said.

More recently, when foreclosure rates spiked in Detroit and Cleveland, Countrywide tapped Acorn again. The Acorn employees told homeowners they found that they would like to help, Shea said. During the conversation, the borrowers were offered use of the Acorn employee's cellphone and given a toll-free number that would speed them through the process.

"We tell them that the lender may be willing to work out a special deal since they are there with us," he said. Acorn is paid $50 to $70 for every person found. The organization is negotiating with other companies to expand these efforts, he said.

HomeFree-USA expects to begin knocking on doors for Ocwen next month. The group's relationship with the company will not influence the advice borrowers receive, HomeFree's Griffin said.

"A homeowner who really needs to sell their home, they are going to take it a little better from us than if a lender tells you, 'You need to go and sell your house,' " she said.