Paul Centopani

While the haggling tapered off slightly alongside the housing market’s seasonal slowdown, home sales remained five times more competitive than the year before, according to Redfin.

With coronavirus inoculations underway and government stimulus likely to come, the outlook for next year’s housing market and lending environment grew more optimistic in December.

The forbearance rate continued its improvement, but the surge of COVID-19 cases could lead to more borrowers needing mortgage relief, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The largest concerns are with pandemic risk and defaults, along with business resilience and adaptability, according to a Wolters Kluwer survey.

While 12,000 mortgages exited forbearance, the most borrowers entered forbearance protection in a week since early September, according to Black Knight.

The November foreclosure rate represented an 80% decline from the year before, according to Attom Data Solutions.

Borrowers who exit CARES Act-related forbearance in the spring and have stacks of other bills to attend to may be in search of liquidity via such products, the company predicts.

Clear HOI — an encrypted, cloud-based tool that automates homeowners insurance underwriting — is getting released to the broader market by Rocket Mortgage’s sister company Nexsys Technologies.

While distressed mortgage rates crept down overall, serious delinquencies still tripled year-ago rates in September, according to CoreLogic.

The surge of COVID-19 cases slowed economic recovery and hampered improvements in the forbearance rate, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Employment worries and the pandemic's ongoing obstacles for home buying wore down consumer confidence in November, according to Fannie Mae.

Bee Mortgage App will use blockchain and automation provided by Elphi to create "a COVID tool for real estate agents" to get fully digital mortgage approval in under three minutes.

Overall housing value growth continued in the third quarter, as some markets more than doubled the national average, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency's Home Price Index.

The nine arraigned individuals face 136 counts of felony charges for allegedly running an advance fee mortgage relief scheme over the last decade, totaling $6 million.

The forbearance rate continued recovering in lockstep with employment improvement, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Mortgage delinquencies dropped to the lowest level since March but, particularly at the seriously delinquent level, they're still much higher than pre-coronavirus rates, according to Black Knight.

As mortgage rates stayed below 3% in the third quarter, originations spiked to the highest quarterly total since 2007 and highest dollar volume since 2005, according to Attom Data Solutions.

The widening chasm between housing supply and demand drove sales to record growth and prices to a seven-year high in October, according to Redfin.

Use of mortgage technology was fast-tracked due to coronavirus lockdowns and kept the lending industry humming, laying the foundation for a greater share of digital closings in 2021.

New-home construction maintained its momentum in October while possible site shutdowns loom.