Origination

Consumer advocates are once again calling for stricter oversight of the reverse mortgage business, with one declaring the product should only be used as a last resort.

Union Bank, San Francisco, which this week rolled out a new 30-year, fixed-rate jumbo loan, plans to hire 75 retail employees and a handful of account executives as it seeks to expand its mortgage business.

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition has filed fair lending complaints against 22 lenders for allegedly requiring high credit scores on Federal Housing Administration-insured loans and refusing to extend credit to qualified borrowers.

The delinquent loan inventory at Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp., Milwaukee, Wis., fell by over 3,900 loans in November, although new delinquency notices outpaced cures by 1,169 loans.

We promise not to lecture in this article but the headline above says it all. If you are reading this, then we commend you for having stuck it out during the past few years. Things have not been easy for sure. So take a minute and congratulate yourself. Reverse mortgages still hold a lot of promise for the future. But you know where we’re going with this.

The amount of money available through a government reverse mortgage in the United States recently decreased and that could be an additional strain on older borrowers who appear to be increasingly reliant on home equity as a source of income as they age.

Long-term rate-indicative Treasury yields, which have been generally trending higher recently, broke into yet another higher range Tuesday afternoon.

Mortgage rates will steadily rise in 2011, according to Freddie Mac's chief economist Frank Nothaft, and refinancing activity will slow as the year progresses.

Starwood Property Trust, a Greenwich, Conn., commercial real estate finance company, has obtained two new lines of credit totaling $275 million. These are in addition to a $350 million financing facility the company received back in August.

There have been some relative improvements seen in commercial mortgage-backed securities delinquencies recently but also some continuing concerns, suggesting that market—while improving in some respects—still could have some hurdles to clear before it bottoms out.