Mark Fogarty

The beleaguered mortgage business has done quite a good job of continuing to provide mortgage finance at respectable levels despite the worst disaster ever to hit it. As the fall meeting season approaches, industry executives should take a moment to congratulate each other on this before they start to plan, plot or commiserate.

At the recent SourceMedia Loss Mitigation Conference in Dallas I sat down with industry experts for a chat on the latest in loss mit.

What does it say for the state of the upended mortgage industry that Standard & Poor's can report the positive news that there is now only 47 months of shadow inventory on hand? Remember, shadow inventory is seriously delinquent or foreclosed real estate that has not yet even been listed for sale—mostly because of the glut of foreclosed properties already in the market.

The mortgage technology arena is changing at the speed of light. There are new developments at MERS. There is the ongoing UCDP (Uniform Collateral Data Portal) initiative at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. MISMO has a new iteration.

August is the time for the summer doldrums, when market activity slows, people take vacations and, in the mortgage business at least, gear up for a busy fall conference season.

State and tribal governments traditionally mistrust each other. But a state agency in New Mexico is an absolute model of cooperation when it comes to housing finance on that state’s reservations.

Recently as I chaired the SourceMedia Buying and Selling Distressed Mortgage Portfolios Forum in New York City, I was thinking about this huge market and how it hasn't quite opened up wide yet. But surely it is in the process of doing so.

It's hard to tell where you’re going to find a good loss mitigation idea. At the SourceMedia Loss Mitigation Conference held in Dallas recently, a participant said the government’s HAMP modification plan was a good loss mit strategy.

Garth Graham, president of Financial Literacy Solutions, Plantation, Fla., thinks that servicers have had plenty of interaction with housing counselors in the current crisis. But he’s not sure they’re handling it the right way, or even looking at the most crucial factors.

It's our desire to meet you, our readers, wherever you happen to be. That’s why we do print editions, conferences and maintain our publication websites. And now we're branching into a new medium, the social media.

David Tobin, principal of Mission Capital Advisors in New York, attended our recent Buying and Selling Distressed Mortgage Portfolios Conference and does not agree with those at the conference who said the gaps between bid and ask are too big in this sector.

When asked about the still-struggling nonagency market might return, some market participants in New York for the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Secondary Market Conference even took on the controversial question of whether a subprime credit secondary market should come back some day.

Bloodcurdling numbers of distressed residential mortgage assets are bad enough. But nonperforming commercial mortgages have also ballooned out, to more than $200 billion of a niche that is only one-third the size of residential.

There's an awful lot of distressed mortgage product out there. Using the MBA's most recent nationwide foreclosure percentage of 4.5% and applied to a universe of $9.5 trillion in residential holdings, that's $374 billion in distressed loans right there.

If there’s one issue in all of finance that sorely needs some sorting out, it’s mortgage regulation and compliance. Dodd-Frank, TILA-RESPA reform, risk retention, servicing agreements and consent orders, qualified residential mortgages, Basel III, there are seemingly dozens of new laws and regulations mortgage lenders must comply with.

Seven states had subprime adjustable-rate mortgage delinquency rates of more than 30% in the first quarter of the year, according to the MBA’s latest report. You could probably name them, right? California, Florida, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan...

At the annual SourceMedia Mortgage Servicing Conference in Dallas, attendees concerned about the future of their industry discussed at length the pros and cons of recent regulatory changes and still pending rules and requirements they may have to abide with in the near future.

The varieties of mortgage fraud never cease to amaze.At a session at the Texas Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual conference in Austin, attendees heard that mortgage fraud can now be combined with legal fraud.

The National Association of Home Builders for the first time has added race and ethnicity data to the quarterly housing affordability survey it has produced for the past 20 years. That’s all to the good. The story the new data tells, however, is an old one.

A New Mexico mortgage banker is pursuing an aggressive growth strategy, acquiring mortgage banking and mortgage brokerage firms all over the country.