Originations

Commercial/multifamily real estate pricing and loan performance are seeing improvement, but it is inconsistent, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The Federal Housing Administration is considering tightening borrowers' debt-to-income ratios, a move that would prevent the most highly leveraged consumers from qualifying to buy a home.

Mortgage application volume declined for the third consecutive week, this time by 5.2% for the week ended July 1, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Synovus, a bank holding company in Columbus, Ga., has created a Senior Housing Group to serve the financing needs of owners of such properties as convalescent and assisted-living care facilities and nursing homes. William E. Shine joins Synovus as director of corporate banking for specialized healthcare lending.

The market for those seniors who are physically unable or do not desire to stay in the homes they owned is apparently going strong, although it has credit issues of its own.

Park National Corp. in Newark, Ohio, will take a higher-than-expected provision for loan losses in the second quarter due to continued credit problems at its Florida banking subsidiary.

Releases of loan-loss reserves can't prop up bank earnings forever, but after about $150 billion of allowance builds during the recession, they can help for a good long while.

Lawyers for the National Credit Union Association told a federal judge in Los Angeles that the federal agency's June 20 suits against JPMorgan and RBS Securities should not exonerate officers and directors of WesCorp FCU in the 2009 failure of the one-time $34-billion corporate credit union.

PMI Group Inc., Walnut Creek, Calif., said it started on July 1 to write new business in two states through a subsidiary it set up as a contingency for when its main mortgage insurance underwriting subsidiary would exceed the risk-to-capital ratio mandates that 16 states have.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has issued new guidance on its policies for approving and recertifying condominium projects that are eligible for Federal Housing Administration financing.

Bank of America has named Mike Hall to replace Paul Szymanski as the head of its warehouse lending business. Szymanski left B of A to reunite with former Countrywide Credit Industries president Stanford Kurland and start a warehouse lending business at PennyMac.

Second quarter bank and thrift earnings could see "some pressure" as a result of "relatively weak" revenues from their mortgage banking businesses, a report from FBR Capital Markets warns.

When asked about the still-struggling nonagency market might return, some market participants in New York for the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Secondary Market Conference even took on the controversial question of whether a subprime credit secondary market should come back some day.

The lower interest rate environment helped our No. 5 producer, David Jaffe of OnQ Financial, Westlake Village, Calif., have a strong year.

What differentiates top-producing mortgage originators from their peers is that they have multiple customer acquisition strategies, they have a higher level of product knowledge and they perform value-added pipeline management activities. What they don’t spend their time on is administrative activities and nor should they, said the chief executive of Mortgage Success Source, Holmdel, N.J.

When marketing your services to the public, you need to be careful about any analogies or other types of references in your materials. What you might think of as being benign, could have a negative effect on your audience.

Like Dorothy in the "Wizard of Oz," the nation's homebuilders aren't in Kansas anymore.

The chief author of legislation to roll back the Comptroller of the Currency’s powers to preempt state consumer protection laws says he doesn’t want a bureaucrat “acting” as the comptroller to approve new rules governing the preemption provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act.

The Private National Mortgage Acceptance Corp. plans to make a big splash in warehouse lending and late this week unveiled who will lead the effort -- Paul Szymanski, once a top warehouse executive at the number one player in that niche: Bank of America.

Median sales prices for condominiums and co-operative apartments in Manhattan were up 9% in the second quarter over the first quarter, but down 6% when compared with the second quarter 2010, a report from the Prudential Douglas Elliman real estate company said.