An executive whose prior firm advised homeowners looking to walkaway from their mortgages says many of those same homeowners maynot be bad risks for new mortgages.

Jon Maddux is a mortgage executive and founder and former CEO ofYouWalkAway.com, a website which provides advice and counsel topeople seeking to walk away from mortgages which had come to costfar more than their underlying real estate was worth.

Maddux has left daily operation of YouWalkAway.com, but hasstarted a similar site, AfterForeclosure.com, which offers advice to consumers who lostprior homes to foreclosures and short sales to get back into thehousing market.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have rules that preclude a borrowerwho has had a foreclosure from obtaining a mortgage for sevenyears, but the Federal Housing Administration will insure amortgage loan with a formerly foreclosed borrower after only threeyears.

And Maddux pointed out that many of these borrowers are in goodfinancial condition; that many have taken to money they hadpreviously deployed in mortgage payments and used it to both payother bills on time and also pay down other debts, thusstrengthening their scores from the credit bureaus.

“What we saw was that consumers take a 100 point hit in theircredit scores from a foreclosure,” Maddux explained. “A one-time100-point hit that they can overcome if they are careful with theirfinances for a few years afterward.”

Maddux maintained that many of these consumers are notnecessarily bad credit risks and should not be penalized solely fortheir foreclosures.

“If they have a long history of making their other payments ontime, they are not deadbeats,” he said.