Servicing

J.I. Kislak, Inc., Miami Lakes, said it inked a deal to buy three distressed multifamily properties from Ocean Bank of Miami. No purchase price was disclosed.

Housing and mortgage trade groups are concerned that federal regulators will propose a narrow exemption to MBS risk retention rules that would impose high capital requirements on plain vanilla mortgages, making them unnecessarily expensive for creditworthy borrowers.

It’s been said of the housing crisis that the faster banks and the GSEs unload their REO properties the quicker markets will recover with prices rising once again.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are considering overhauling the 25-basis-point servicing fee they pay to mortgage banking firms that process their loans, according to a report in American Banker.

A group of House Financial Services Democrats are raising questions about whether taxpayers will be fully protected under the terms of a recent settlement over poorly underwritten loans held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

As the backlog of foreclosures continues to drive down housing values, losses on private label MBS will increase in 2011, according to a new report from Moody's Investors Service.

Experts predicting a better year for the mortgage market foresee more of a status quo situation when reviewing the foreclosure inventory, especially in states like Florida and Nevada, which are not expected to see their real estate owned property books shrink any time soon—at least not in the next couple of years.

Real estate owned properties are on everybody’s mind, and this book of business is raising concerns about how long it will take for the REO inventory to be absorbed by the marketplace.The volume of properties going through the foreclosure process is staggering. As more foreclosures continue to add to the existing inventory it seems to be no end in sight to the crisis in the near future.

Merrill Lynch Credit Corp. has renewed its private label production and servicing agreement with PHH Mortgage, Mt. Laurel, N.J., according to a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Even when it is obvious that a specific business strategy makes perfect logical sense, it becomes far more convincing when data confirm its value as well.The National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling program is one case in point. For homeowners who work with an NFMC counselor, “the odds of curing a foreclosure” are 1.7 times higher than for homeowners who do not.