Origination

The Federal Reserve Wednesday afternoon revealed that it will start purchasing agency MBS once again as a way to help support the mortgage market.

Mortgage bankers are once again enjoying the salad days: interest rates are the lowest they've been since the early 1950s, and their phones are ringing with frantic calls from consumers who want to refinance. The industry has seen this picture before: applications are flooding in at a pace not seen in several quarters, which means they need to staff up, but by how much?

FCI Lender Services, the nation's largest servicer of privately held mortgages, has received final servicing approval from the Federal Housing Administration.

Consumers are sharing more personal information online than ever — but they don't want to share it with their mortgage lenders and banks.

Demand for Federal Housing Administration single-family loans rose in August with lenders funding $17.4 billion of government-backed product, an 8% increase from the prior month.

Sales of existing single-family homes jumped 8.5% in August despite hurricane weather in the Northeast, igniting hopes that the long beleaguered housing market could be coming up for air.

Mortgage bankers originated $291 billion of residential loans in the second quarter — the industry's worst performance since the height of the housing crisis almost three years ago, according to exclusive survey figures compiled by National Mortgage News and the Quarterly Data Report.

Mortgage applications rose by just under 1% on a seasonally adjusted basis for the week ending September 16 with refinancings gaining steam, according to new figures compiled by the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Home sales in California, the largest single-family market in U.S., are likely to rise 1% in 2012 after being essentially flat this year, according to a new forecast from the California Association of Realtors.

A top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee said Tuesday she is disappointed that the GOP has not been able to fix Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since taking control of the House in January.