With millions of Americans out of work and struggling to pay their rent, the federal government is offering landlords a break in the hopes it will avert a tidal wave of evictions.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced on Monday that landlords with government-backed mortgages are eligible for an additional three months of mortgage forbearance—provided they don’t evict tenants who can’t pay their rent during that time. The initial forbearance period, in which building owners suffering coronavirus-related hardships could put off their mortgage payments, was about to expire for those who had sought assistance at the start of the pandemic. The extension is designed to trickle down to renters by taking the pressure off landlords who are on the hook for their own monthly mortgage payments.

The forbearance is only for owners of multifamily properties of five or more units who have mortgages backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Nearly six million properties across the U.S. have a substantial risk of flooding that isn’t disclosed by federal flood maps, according to a nonprofit research firm that released its own U.S. flood maps Monday.

The maps from nonprofit First Street Foundation highlight the widespread nature of flood risk. Flooding caused about $17 billion in property damage a year from 2010 to 2018, according to the Association of State Floodplain Managers.

Homeowners, developers and city planners have long used the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood maps, which outline flood zones. FEMA’s maps label which properties have at least a 1% annual risk of flooding, also called a 100-year flood zone.

The First Street analysis suggests that millions of American homeowners could be more vulnerable to flooding than they realize, and many may lack the resources to rebuild their homes in the event of severe flood damage. Mortgage lenders typically require buyers

The numbers: After two consecutive months of decline, the index of pending home sales soared 44.3% in May as compared with April, the National Association of Realtors reported Monday.

The monthly increase was the largest ever since the National Association of Realtors started the index in January 2001. “This has been a spectacular recovery for contract signings, and goes to show the resiliency of American consumers and their evergreen desire for homeownership,” Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said in the report. “This bounce back also speaks to how the housing sector could lead the way for a broader economic recovery.”

The index measures real-estate transactions for previously-owned homes where a contract was signed but the sale had not yet closed, benchmarked to contract-signing activity in 2001.

Compared with a year ago, contract signings were still down 5.1%, a sign of how steep the declines