Servicing

Efforts to negotiate a settlement between state attorneys general and the top five mortgage servicers collapsed late last week after California pulled out of the negotiations.

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago has received regulatory approval to finally convert to a capital structure that was mandated by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act back in 1999.

After several weeks of negotiations, Bank of America and Fortress Investments have ended talks over the bank selling its correspondent mortgage division to the publicly traded investment fund, officials close to the deal told National Mortgage News late Monday.

The delinquency rate on securitized multifamily loans jumped over 50 basis points from August to nearly 17% in September and it continues to be the worst performing property type in the commercial mortgage-backed securities market.

Home price problems, continued high unemployment numbers and loan seasoning are behind the slowing pace of the improvement in the current to delinquent roll rates for nonagency mortgage loans in the past few months, according to the analysts at Barclays Capital.

August home sales in Phoenix surged to the highest level in five years with a total of 9,657 properties closing, according to the San Diego-based real estate analytic company DataQuick.

There was $5.7 billion of primary new mortgage insurance written in August by the members of the Mortgage Insurance Cos. of America, marking four consecutive months of increased business.

The good news: More than 43,200 condominium apartments have been sold in South Florida's coastal markets since the real estate boom began in earnest in 2003. The bad news: Most of the buyers are not primary users.

Lew Ranieri doesn't suffer fools easily—and it galls him that he sometimes gets blamed for the nation's housing crisis because he helped put mortgage-backed securities on the map in the early 1980s when he was a young bond trader at Salomon Brothers.

Servicers these days face a choice: sell servicing released or retained? The servicing-released option has gained enough traction that GNMA president Ted Tozer is worried about having too few Ginnie Mae issuers (the little guys are selling FHA and VA product servicing-released to the big guys).