Origination

Many people will tell you they want to achieve success during their lifetime. But what really defines success? Success is personal and for it to have real impact on your life, you must have defined what success really means to you. You may succeed based on someone else's standards or definition but remain unfulfilled. And you will actually feed unsuccessful with no sense of personal accomplishment.

Several lenders have recently been investigated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and other regulatory bodies concerning their use of Marketing Services Agreements and similar types of agreements.

Agency mortgage-backed securities certainly dominate the market today in many respects, but as one aspect of the recent strategic plan for the GSEs highlights, the private-label market can be considered ahead of them in terms of loan-level disclosure and it is time for that to change.

It would appear that certain politicians - both left and right - look at guarantee fees and say to themselves: Hey, here's a way to raise some revenue and no one will blame us for taxing mortgage lenders. Well, guess again.

The CFPB recently released its 800-plus-page enforcement manual, in which it lays out its expectations for mortgage banks and brokers. A review of the enforcement manual shows that the mortgage business is about to change forever.

While Fannie Mae continues to bleed red ink like a busted crankcase, Freddie Mac turned a profit in the fourth quarter. Overall, it earned $1.5 billion -- but then had to give its "Godfather" (the U.S. Treasury) $1.7 billion in protection money, er, I mean, dividends. Sounds a bit screwy to me but then again the past 10 years in this industry have been screwy.

The MobileLO iPad app is a point of sale application that allows loan officers and brokers to enter the data fields of a Uniform Residential Loan Application (Form 1003), generate a Good Faith Estimate and other federal and state-specific disclosure documents, pull the applicant's credit report and collect electronic signatures.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau seems to be farther along in its thinking about merging RESPA and TILA regulations than many suspected. Since last summer, the new bureau has mainly focused on devising the most informative and consumer-friendly good-faith estimate disclosures through numerous rounds of consumer testing and public input. Industry groups were impressed by this effort.

Mortgage companies cut 3,200 full-time employees from their payrolls in January, according to government figures released Friday morning.

Freddie Mac posted net "comprehensive" earnings $1.5 billion in the fourth quarter, but must turn around and pay the U.S. Treasury a $1.7 billion dividend, which means it ultimately lost money during the period.