Compliance & Regulation

Loan performance has improved since the housing crisis. But credit challenges persist, while higher housing costs combined with a plateau in wages have put increased strain on some borrowers' finances.

Freddie Mac is making plans for its first risk-sharing transaction tied to actual losses on mortgages with higher loan-to-value ratios in the 80% to 95% range.

Brian Webster, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's mortgage originations program manager who has worked on a number of technology-related policy and research initiatives, is leaving the agency to join Wells Fargo Home Mortgage.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren is withdrawing her support for a Republican bill that had been on the fast track to bar the Treasury Department from selling Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred shares, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mission Capital Advisors in New York has merged its mortgage services business with Global Financial Review Inc. in Englewood, Colo.

In the wake of an unprecedented U.S. housing bust that evolved into a global financial crisis, the business of bundling home loans that aren't backed by the American government into bonds that can be sold to investors has all but disappeared.

American International Group won a decision that narrowed the claims by six investment funds that opted out of a $970.5 million class-action settlement last year over allegations the insurer misled investors about its exposure to subprime mortgages.

Evans Bancorp in Hamburg, N.Y., has agreed to pay $825,000 to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of mortgage redlining.

The Justice Department's announcement that it would target individual executives at banks and other companies that are being investigated for wrongdoing has sparked a debate about whether the move is actually substantive or instead just designed to boost the agency's public image.

The rising costs to service mortgages reflects a market where there are not only downsides to being too small, but hurdles to being too large — raising the question of whether there's a middle ground where servicers are not too big, not too small, but just right.