Servicing

Mortgage professional hiring and new job appointments for the week ending Jan. 30.

Residential real estate in the Philadelphia region saw falling prices and modestly rising sales in 2014's fourth quarter.

Four years into a $1 billion foreclosure prevention plan, Florida is not getting enough money into the hands of struggling homeowners and has enrolled fewer than 100 people into one of its five programs.

TCF Financial took $44 million in charges to rid itself of mortgages made before the housing collapse. A distressed-asset investor purchased more than $400 million in loans from the company, and another pool of bad mortgages may be marked for sale soon.

The Federal Housing Administration will make foreclosure protections available to a larger number of surviving spouses of deceased reverse mortgage borrowers.

Banks have made progress cutting their exposure to risky home equity lines of credit, ahead of a key 10-year threshold when billions of dollars of them will reset to higher monthly payments. But there are some prominent exceptions, especially among regional banks.

South Florida is inching closer to housing stability, according to a monthly report by Freddie Mac.

Payments to Philadelphia's city treasury and utilities, from mortgage foreclosures and delinquent tax, gas and water bills, surged to $58.3 million last year, a 40% jump from $34.4 million in 2013.

Regulatory attention is supposed to be laser-focused on servicers right now, especially when it comes to how consistent they are in applying workouts. So regulators should be looking closely at whether loans have forbearance.

The government has added further protections to reverse mortgage borrowers' spouses who are not named in the loan agreement, but placed conditions under which they are ineligible for older protections.