Foreclosures

At the onset of the millennium, house flippers — people who purchased imperfect homes, renovated them and resold them at a profit mere months later — ran rampant in U.S. housing markets.

Mortgage delinquency levels fell about 30% last year, even as borrowers received more credit, according to TransUnion.

Atlantic City, N.J., has the fifth worst vacancy rate in the U.S, according to RealtyTrac.

The financial crisis turned a lot of Americans into renters, because they couldn’t keep paying their mortgage, or because high unemployment and stagnant wages in the ensuing years forced them to put off homeownership.

Arch's mortgage insurance unit saw an increase of over 1,000% in fourth-quarter underwriting income due to a significant decline in losses and loss-adjustment expenses.

U.S. Bancorp agreed to pay $10 million while Banco Santander settled for $3.4 million following missteps in how they handled earlier orders from regulators to fix faulty foreclosure practices, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Foreclosures nationwide continued to decrease in December, according to CoreLogic.

HSBC North America Holdings has agreed to pay $470 million to settle allegations it engaged in abusive practices in its mortgage foreclosure, origination and servicing operations.

The rate of home price recovery during the seven years that a foreclosure remains on a consumer's credit report is one measure of whether borrowers who strategically defaulted made the right choice by walking away. But the results vary, depending on when, where and in what price tier that borrowers defaulted.

Borrowers who walked away from underwater mortgages are coming back to the market. Some lenders are ready to give them a second chance.

After years of refi-fueled origination volume, lenders have their hopes pegged to a resurgent purchase market in 2016 and beyond. But it raises an important question: will strategic default rear its head again in the next downturn?

The delinquency rate on commercial mortgage-backed securities dropped sharply in January, thanks to the resolution of New York's Stuyvesant Town loan, according to Trepp.

Key Democratic lawmakers are urging the Department of Housing and Urban Development to tighten its program for selling nonperforming guaranteed loans to ensure servicers have exhausted all loss mitigation options before the loans are sold to private investors.

The number of U.S. mortgages that were underwater continued to improve in the fourth quarter, although there are still millions of properties in the category, according to RealtyTrac.

A New Jersey man has been sentenced to six years in prison for running a scam that victimized distressed homeowners and private investors.

Mortgage loan delinquencies dropped in December, according to Black Knight Financial Services' First Look report.

David Miller resigned as chief executive officer of Silver Bay Realty Trust Corp., and board member Thomas Brock will lead the single-family landlord during the search for a new CEO.

Synovus Financial in Columbus, Ga., reported a higher fourth-quarter profit on stronger interest and fee income.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has rejected a nonprofit housing group's allegations of racial discrimination against U.S. Bank. HUD found that the bank properly maintain foreclosed homes in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods and in some cases spent more rehabilitating the homes than in white areas.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has filed charges against three California-based home loan modification companies and nine of their employees for allegedly violating the Fair Housing Act.