Servicing

Commercial real estate investment banking firm George Smith Partners has hired Eric Hamermesh as senior vice president, and director of business development.

Impac Mortgage Holdings, Irvine, posted a profit just shy of $1 million in the third quarter, a 68% decline from the same period last year, as it struggles to generate new revenue from its mortgage and real estate service businesses.

Amid continued weakness for the Federal Home Loan Bank System, its chief regulator said it is committed to getting the regional GSEs back to their core mission of lending to members.

The American Securitization Forum Tuesday continued to defend residential mortgage-backed securities against foreclosure-related challenges with the release of a promised study that its executive director said differs from the findings of a congressional oversight committee on the issue.

While robo-signing has been the most high-profile foreclosure concern for residential mortgage-backed securities lately, it appears it is a relatively low risk compared to the currently less-prominent one related to missing and defective documents, according to a recent Moody’s Investors Service report.

In their first week back since the midterm elections, lawmakers are taking up the robo-signing scandal in multiple venues.

The Federal Housing Administration ended fiscal 2010 with a cash reserve ratio of just 0.50%, a slight decline from the same period a year ago, but strong enough that Congress will not have to use taxpayer money to bolster the fund.

It’s not as hard as it used to be to find good news in the Mortgage Bankers Association’s delinquency survey.It used to be that the only glimmer of good news was in the performance of Department of Veterans Affairs mortgages and a small contiguous area of low-delinquency states in the Midwest/Mountain area (the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming).

Thanks to intense national scrutiny on the faulty procedural practices by mortgage servicers, foreclosure logjams are intensifying in several markets with little sign of easing anytime soon. Moreover, sources told Mortgage Servicing News that Fannie Mae is now keeping tabs on how much foreclosure moratoriums have cost the GSE, and plans to pass on that cost to its servicers.

Foreclosure-gate has highlighted long-standing flaws in the servicing process, but “larger problems” with the mortgage servicing business will require “serious” reforms, according to Federal Reserve Board governor Sarah Bloom Raskin.