Originations

All Home Equity Conversion Mortgage applications which received case numbers after Dec. 1, 2010 must have contain the revised closing certification, which includes language that pertains to home sellers and purchasers involved in a HECM for Purchase transaction.

Having recently completed its acquisition of Massachusetts-based lender ClearPoint Funding, investment bank Gleacher & Co. Inc. has made plans to—among other things—officially transfer its related capital markets group to New York from Marlborough, Mass.

Agricultural Federal Credit Union of Washington, D.C., is the first credit union to complete a CU Mortgage Association HarmonyLoan, which allows homeowners to adjust their interest rates with the market without the expense and trouble of a traditional refinance or new mortgage.

Last week we spoke about creating opportunities for business. But there is a whole other side to having lost a deal being good news: There are just some clients that you should not work with.

Mortgage application volume rebounded slightly, driven by an increase in refinance demand during the week between Christmas and New Year's Day, according to new figures released by the Mortgage Bankers Association.

House prices are likely to go down during the first half of 2011 and then rebound in the second half, according to many forecasters.

Quorum Federal Credit Union, Purchase, N.Y., has entered into a timeshare receivables purchase facility with Bluegreen Corp. of Boca Raton, Fla., allowing the CU to buy timeshare receivables on a non-recourse basis.

There was no shortage of short-sale transactions last year in South Florida.

The Conference of State Bank Supervisors has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's implementation team as a starting point in an effort to coordinate supervision between the two.

The often unintended, adverse consequence of the subprime product crisis is the lender’s tendency to use caution when introducing new and affordable loan programs that are not “plain vanilla.” Agreed, the era of “exotic” mortgages is gone. Yet, going forward, the hope is that instead of reducing mortgage choices, the industry will come up with well structured creative options.

Most of the nation is familiar with the major snowstorm that did something very rare—practically shut down New York City. So when I was not outside shoveling show, I had the opportunity to watch plenty of television, and I saw one particularly bad piece of advertising that mortgage marketers should never emulate.

Tower Bancorp Inc. of Harrisburg, Pa., is discontinuing the operations of a mortgage division that belonged to First Chester County Corp., a bank it bought last month.

The way Tom Wind of J.I. Kislak Mortgage sees it, dozens of mortgage banking firms will fold their tents this year as refinancings wane, but his young firm will more than quadruple its loan originations this year.

The Mortgage Bankers Association wants the Federal Reserve to ease up on its compensation rules allowing production managers who originate loans to share in the profits of their branch office.

At the 2010 Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual convention I attended in Atlanta, some saw an attitude in the participants that had been absent in the past few years—confidence about the industry’s future.

Alex J. Pollock, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and frequent contributor to this page, is the most elegant writer on the mortgage business we have. A reader of his book Boom & Bust: Financial Cycles and Human Prosperity (AEI Press) will be delighted to find quotations from Genesis, Aesop, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, financial analyst Walter Bagehot, the historian Paterculus, philosophers Kierkegaard and Santayana, and populists Will Rogers and Yogi Berra among its observations.

November was the best month of 2010 so far for the nation's private mortgage insurers in terms of new insurance written, while it was the second best for new applications. Furthermore, the cure/default ratio was back above 90% for the first time in three months, according to data from the Mortgage Insurance Cos. of America.

Pebblebrook Hotel Trust of Bethesda, Md., late last week filed a $500 million shelf registration to sell additional shares of its common stock to the public, a sign that the hotel industry thinks the worst may be over for the sector.

The Eleventh Federal Home Loan District Cost of Funds Index declined by eight basis points between October and November, resuming its downward movement after one month where there was virtually no change.

MDA Lending Solutions launched a suite of mortgage fraud prevention software based on the recommendations that Fannie Mae gave the industry in the Loan Quality Initiative.