Servicing

Bank of America's residential servicing department Friday entered into a settlement with the Department of Justice to reimburse members of the military whose homes were foreclosed on while they were on active duty.

The Securities and Exchange Commission could hurt the housing recovery if it imposes tighter restrictions on real estate investment trusts that purchase and securitize mortgages, according to industry comments filed with the agency.

Despite continuing housing market and mortgage-related challenges, builder D.R. Horton Inc. generated profits in its fourth fiscal quarter and full fiscal year ending Sept. 30 that improved upon the same quarter last year but were lower than FY 2010.

Fortress Investment Group appears to be the winning bidder on a $50 billon package of mortgage servicing rights being peddled by Bank of America, according to industry analysts watching the deal.

The New York banking department has reached an agreement with Morgan Stanley to implement new mortgage servicing standards after signing a similar deal with Goldman Sachs in September.

A new Senate bill proposing to wind down the GSEs by at least 10% a year also includes a provision that would replace the private MERS System with an identical platform run by the Federal Housing Finance Agency -- along with new national standards for mortgage title transfers.

Regulators have identified how borrowers may have been harmed by a multitude of foreclosure errors, but they are largely leaving it to the servicers and their consultants to figure out how to fix it.

Ocwen Financial Corp. this morning said it would raise $375 million of new equity and use some of the proceeds to buy $15 billion of mortgage servicing rights from JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The bonuses paid to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives are structured to retain managers who have the skills to run the giant mortgage companies, according to a letter Federal Housing Finance Agency acting director Edward DeMarco sent to several senators on Thursday.

Radian Guaranty's efforts to build market share seem to be paying off in a big way. The company had nearly $2.1 billion of primary mortgage insurance written during October, up from $1.2 billion written for the same month one year prior.