Lenders efforts to help homeowners stave off foreclosure are intensifying, according to a new report released Wednesday by the Office of the Comptroller of theCurrency (OCC). But the news isn’t all good — the banking regulator also said that more than 50 percent of homeowners with loans modified in the first half of last year had fallen behind on their payments, yet again, within the 12 months that followed. The agency’s mortgage report showed that difficult economic conditions resulted in higher rates of mortgage delinquencies, which increased to 8.5 percent of all serviced mortgages. But as the administration’s Making Home Affordable program got underway last quarter, home retention actions have increased by nearly 75 percent, the OCC said.

Such actions, which totaled 440,000 during the second quarter, again outpaced the number of new foreclosures, the agency reported. Total foreclosures in process make up about 2.9 percent of the loan portfolio evaluated by the banking regulator (which covers about 64 percent of all first lien mortgages in the country). The percentage of modifications that reduced principal and interest increased to more than 78 percent of all new modifications, up from about 54 percent in the previous quarter. The agency continues to stress that modifications which reduce borrowers’ monthly payments ultimately produce lower levels of re-defaults and longer term sustainability. The depressed state of the economy continued to adversely affect all loan categories, spanning prime, Alt-A, and subprime, the OCC said. The percentage of serious delinquencies increased to 5.3 percent of all loans in the agency’s study. The report highlighted particularly troublesome stats for so-called payment option adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), which allow borrowers to choose from a range of minimum payments. In the second quarter, 15.2 percent of the more than 900,000 payment option ARMs in the portfolio were seriously delinquent, and 10 percent were in the process of foreclosure.