Origination

The latest round of weaker-than-expected U.S. employment numbers has driven the long-term rate-indicative 10-year Treasury yield to yet another record low.

So folks who recall that the Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach county market was one of the hardest hit during the housing crash might question the sanity of starting a total of 6,300 more apartments so soon after the debacle.

With all the troubling news coming out of Washington for lenders these days, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a much-needed win to the industry last week. In Freeman v. Quicken Loans, the U.S. Supreme Court held that no cause of action existed under RESPA for a lender’s retention of a marked up fee.

If you’re looking for a patch of brightness in the national job numbers that came out Friday morning look at the mortgage brokerage employment line: broker firms added 2,300 loan officers and other staffers to their payrolls in April.

The Government National Mortgage Association approved 35 issuer licenses last year and hopes to approve about the same this year, according to agency president Ted Tozer.

Is the Government National Mortgage Association actually making progress in clearing its backlog of issuer applications? Answer: It all depends on who you ask.

Fannie Mae bought just $52 billion of home mortgages from its seller/servicers in April, a 45% plunge from March, according to new figures released by the GSE. Freddie Mac bought $26 billion of loans, a 39% decline from March.

Employment in the residential finance sector fell to 266,100 full-time positions in April from 267,600 in March, a difference of about 1,500 jobs.

Abacus Federal Savings Bank and more than a dozen of its former employees are facing criminal charges related to a scheme in which it allegedly falsified information on mortgage applications so that unqualified borrowers could secure loans.

Newly initiated foreclosures by the Federal Housing Administration jumped 247% in April from a year earlier, while the overall number of foreclosure starts fell 3.1% in the same period.