Servicing

Future losses at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be driven not by their operating results, but by the fact they must continue to pay the U.S. Treasury hefty dividends on the preferred stock the government owns in the two, according to a new report from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods.

Freddie Mac is coming to market with a $538 million commercial MBS deal backed by 19 multifamily properties owned by Apartment Investment & Management Co.

Less than two years after it acquired Federal Trust Bank in Sanford, Fla., so it could qualify for a federal bailout, insurance giant Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. is selling the thrift to another Florida banking company.

Distressed home sales in California accounted for 48% of all purchase transactions in April, a three-point decline from the prior month, according to new figures compiled by the California Association of Realtors.

While a religious group was predicting the imminent Apocalypse last week, a set of financial services industry representatives were warning of the possible end to their own world — the collapse of the securitization market.

Regulators' mortgage servicing consent orders require the nation’s megabanks to conduct a thorough review of their foreclosures. On Friday they were told what "thorough" means.

Today, mortgage defaults that cannot be resolved through other alternatives and end up back in lenders’ hands are likely to have had to clear a lot more legal hurdles than they have traditionally to get there. But often that’s only round one.

The U.S. government and a group of private investors plan to spin off the subprime lending and servicing division of American International Group, by selling $500 million worth of stock to the public – through a REIT structure.

The special "rocket dockets" established in Florida last year to help slog through the backlog of residential foreclosure filings will be gone as of July 1, potentially paralyzing the already overloaded court system with an influx of cases and delays.

Fannie Mae chief economist Doug Duncan believes cash purchases of homes will continue at "quite high levels" for the rest of this year as investors and even some homebuyers by-pass the traditional mortgage process.