Compliance & Regulation

Getting licensed to be a mortgage loan officer is simple – or so some readers have told us. But we’ve also heard stories about failure rates in some states approaching 40%.

For every positive step taken by lenders and the law enforcement community to stop people from scamming the system, it seems that fraudsters are one step ahead, experts conceded at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Fraud Issues Conference in Phoenix this week.

Changes made to the Obama administration's flagship mortgage refinance program, HARP, have boosted profits at the nation's largest banks at the expense of homeowners and U.S. taxpayers, according to mortgage experts testifying at a Senate hearing this week.

Fannie Mae this week established new timelines to expedite residential short sales as required by its regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

At the start of this year, nearly one in four mortgages was underwater and 4.5 million mortgages were seriously delinquent. And today, some studies estimate that as many as 10 million borrowers are at risk of defaulting on their mortgages in the coming years. One of the problems that has made things even harder for struggling homeowners is the state of the mortgage servicing industry.

The judge’s decision in a hearing the New York State Supreme Court held Tuesday afternoon on the $8.5 billion Countrywide Financial Corp. settlement appears to have kept the proceedings shorter than they otherwise might have been.

The Mortgage Bankers Association is supporting a Senate bill to streamline the Home Affordable Refinancing Program which relieves lenders of repurchase risk when they refinance underwater GSE borrowers.

It's been a bumpy ride in recent quarters, but loan-loss provisions have gradually tapered off and early signs from first-quarter reports suggest that lower provisions may be here to stay.

Tongues are clucking in the industry about the death of the ‘transitory’ license with many nonbank loan officers believing that their depository brethren are at a financial disadvantage.

The Securities and Exchange Commission late Tuesday reached a settlement with H&R Block subsidiary Option One Mortgage Corp., over charges that the now-defunct subprime lender misled investors that bought some of the firm’s MBS.