Servicing

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.

Ocwen Financial is one of at least three investors that were invited in by Goldman Sachs to make a final round of bids on Litton Loan Servicing, the Wall Street firm’s specialty servicing division, according to investment bankers and others close to the situation.

Fannie Mae has approved a second subsidiary of Genworth Mortgage Insurance Corp. as an eligible mortgage insurance writer. Several of the private mortgage insurers have established subsidiaries to keep on writing new business in the event their main operation breaches the 25:1 risk-to-capital ratio or minimum policy position required by 16 states.