Compliance & Regulation

The Senate Banking Committee Tuesday afternoon approved the nomination of Joseph Smith to be the next director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency by a 16-6 vote -- but several Republicans are planning to delay his confirmation by the full Senate.

With the government agency that dominates the reverse mortgage space working on moves to address the increase in tax and insurance default concerns there, some players may want to keep an eye on how these affect the market for this product.

New Jersey has become the 19th state to restrict the use of private transfer fees which require a percentage of a home's sales price be paid to a private third party each time the property is sold, often for up to 99 years.

The robo-signing fiasco has energized overall fraud prevention and management efforts prompting financial service providers to focus on short sales and foreclosure fraud.Compared to fraud, robo-signing mistakes that derive from carelessness and loan processing inefficiency are easier to detect and prevent. Insiders agree that fraudsters who often collaborate with employees of a mortgage firm tend to challenge both lenders and their borrowers with new scams that are becoming increasingly more complicated.

Ginnie Mae will join Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in requiring mortgages it purchases to be transmitted in the Uniform Loan Delivery Dataset standard — the set of data points and e-document formats the government-sponsored enterprises will mandate for all mortgages it purchases beginning Sept. 1, 2011.

Recent interest movement in Treasuries has narrowed their yield spread with real estate investment trusts, making some companies in the sector of publicly traded property and mortgage investment firms less attractive buys, according to Credit Suisse.

As they get ready to deal with the challenges of the New Year credit counselors, lenders and servicers are reshuffling their fraud prevention efforts and joining resources.The Consumer Federation of America is combating fraud one scam at a time by bringing together communities at the state and local level.

The number of mortgages with negative equity fell nearly 2% in the third quarter from the previous quarter mostly due to foreclosures, according to a CoreLogic report issued Monday morning.

Though regulators have so far been vague about what kinds of national servicing standards they hope Congress will enact next year, momentum appears to be growing behind the concept.

Anyone expecting a quick and narrow resolution of mortgage servicers' troubles from foreclosure process failures probably hasn't talked to Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, who heads the 50-state coalition investigating the industry.