Foreclosures

Two Justice Department lawyers leading an effort to hold financial firms accountable for the mortgage-fed debacle that fueled the Great Recession stopped in to talk strategy in mid-2009 with Jerry Brown, then California's attorney general.

San Francisco's controller discouraged lawmakers from going forward with a proposal to use the city's eminent-domain powers to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, citing federal limitations and risks to the city's borrowing costs.

The expiration of the federal Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act leaves servicers dealing with a patchwork of state laws and investor rules, while renters living in REO properties are at a greater risk of eviction.

Dan Sparks helped Goldman Sachs Group Inc. profit from its bets against subprime mortgages. Now he's expanding credit to Americans hurt when those types of loans soured and the housing market collapsed.

Standard & Poor's tab is $1.4 billion — including $52.5 million for Illinois — to resolve long-standing allegations by federal and state authorities that the firm misled investors in the run-up to 2008's financial collapse.

Bank of America plans to lay off 202 employees in a loan servicing unit in Norfolk, Va., by March 29 because of the continuing decline in the number of delinquent mortgages.

The Federal Housing Administration's new foreclosure relief options for nonborrowing spouses of reverse mortgage customers will increase loan servicers' costs, and some question how many consumers they will actually help.

The sale of real estate owned properties generated greater returns than short sales in December, according to Black Knight Financial Services.

When Seattle Mayor Ed Murray created a blue-ribbon panel on housing affordability in September, he used the word "urgency."

While Rhode Island's real estate market made gains in 2014, the aftereffects of the foreclosure crisis continue to hold the housing market back from a more robust recovery.

The number of foreclosure cases initiated against Hawaii property owners fell last year for the first time in four years.

Residential real estate in the Philadelphia region saw falling prices and modestly rising sales in 2014's fourth quarter.

Four years into a $1 billion foreclosure prevention plan, Florida is not getting enough money into the hands of struggling homeowners and has enrolled fewer than 100 people into one of its five programs.

Stability is gradually returning to the housing market following the foreclosure crisis, according to Freddie Mac.

The Federal Housing Administration will make foreclosure protections available to a larger number of surviving spouses of deceased reverse mortgage borrowers.

New Jersey’s largest home-grown savings bank continued to shed loans and deposits in the fourth quarter as it continues to wait to be acquired by a commercial bank from upstate New York.

South Florida is inching closer to housing stability, according to a monthly report by Freddie Mac.

Payments to Philadelphia's city treasury and utilities, from mortgage foreclosures and delinquent tax, gas and water bills, surged to $58.3 million last year, a 40% jump from $34.4 million in 2013.

The government has added further protections to reverse mortgage borrowers' spouses who are not named in the loan agreement, but placed conditions under which they are ineligible for older protections.

More than 300,000 South Floridians who lost their homes during the housing bust could be eligible to own again over the next eight years.