Origination

Despite a shadow inventory of 1.6 million seriously delinquent loans, and a huge inventory of foreclosures, nearly 50% of 900 housing markets tracked by CoreLogic registered price gains last year.

When it comes to mortgage problems, Bank of America and its largest rivals are hogging most of the headlines. But smaller banks are also struggling with high levels of delinquent loans that are holding back a housing recovery.

The mortgage insurance division of Genworth Financial is beginning to see a noticeable pick up in HARP refinancing applications, a sign that the '2.0' version of the program may finally be gaining traction.

How oppressive are distressed sales to the housing market? Try this: The top 50 sellers of homes are banks, according to Jonathan Smoke of Housing Intelligence, the research arm of the Hanley Wood publishing company.

In these times where dispensing consumer credit has been akin to doing it through an eyedropper, the use of alternative data sources is one way to possibly increase the flow of money, one proponent said.

The apartment sector is projected to lead the housing market on the road to recovery, but growth in the multifamily sector will be highly uneven, industry experts said last week in Orlando.

Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock Financial, is nobody's fool - not by a long shot. He cut his teeth at First Boston many moons ago, helped shape the MBS market, and then went on to create a financial services powerhouse: BlackRock

Often, companies adopt more aggressive compensation strategies hoping to maximize their competitiveness in the market. To do so, they will adopt practices that "sound" compliant but in actual practice clearly violate compensation rules. In other words, they have contracts that say one thing but practices that in fact violate the rules.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke called on regulators to "look carefully" at rules which diminish the origination of prudently underwritten mortgages, telling a gathering of home builders that the health of the housing market is central to the vitality of the economy as a whole.

Salt Lake City-based lender Primary Residential Mortgage Inc. has created a new “enterprise risk management” group with the goal of managing risk through the entire loan origination process and ensuring that the company has appropriate monitoring and evaluation policies.