Compliance & Regulation

The apartment-lending units of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were among their few money makers after the U.S. housing collapse. Now they should help transform the U.S. mortgage industry.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau prohibits actions aimed at circumventing loan officer compensation rules. One example was a lender who permitted teams of LOs to share commissions.

Housing market trends continue to show improvement in February as housing prices stabilize and foreclosure starts decrease to 2005 levels, according to the March installment of the Obama administration's Housing Scorecard.

Unlicensed loan processor gets over six years in federal prison for his actions.

Efforts to help underwater borrowers with second liens have had little success, and the Treasury's authority to create new homeowner aid programs under the Troubled Asset Relief Program has expired.

While distributed denial-of-service attacks typically crash systems with waves of invalid data requests, the manner in which Ellie Mae's technology was overwhelmed suggests the culprits were familiar with the mortgage business.

The CFPB report for full year 2013 shows that there were over 160,000 complaints to the bureau from homeowners, of which 60,000 were complaints about the mortgage process.

A U.S. magistrate judge in North Carolina dealt a blow to government efforts to use the 1980s-era Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act to penalize big banks, but many experts say the decision—which is not binding—may just be a temporary glitch.

The Mortgage Bankers Association urged the Senate and House finance committees to pass the Expiring Provisions Improvement Reform and Efficiency Act, saying the bill contains "several critical provisions" for real estate financing markets and the economic recovery.

New rules should protect the FHA from losses on reverse mortgages and make prepayments more predictable for bond investors, but they also slow the production of loans available for securitization.