Underwriting

Mortgage application fraud risk continued growing for the fifth consecutive month, and the recent California wildfires are partly to blame, according to First American Financial Corp.

Liquidity, products and pricing are the main concerns for the secondary mortgage market in 2019.

A year ago, National Mortgage News made five predictions regarding how the mortgage industry would fare in 2018 — and we got four of them right.

Adjustable-rate mortgages in November had their highest share of closed loans since Ellie Mae started tracking this data in 2011 as rates for 30-year loans reached 5.15%.

Online competition has threatened brick-and-mortar retail, but as holiday shopping surveys this year show, certain businesses in the sector are still attractive to consumers and commercial mortgage lenders.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has proposed barring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from using credit scores developed by VantageScore over concern about conflicts of interest with the joint venture of Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

Ditech Holding Corp. is proposing to pay $257,000 and improve governance to settle a stockholder lawsuit alleging that a lack of oversight allowed improprieties to occur in several mortgage-related business lines.

Another adjustable-rate mortgage index is going away as the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco will no longer publish the monthly Eleventh District Cost of Funds Index after January 2020.

Mortgage credit available to consumers increased in November by 1.1% from the previous month as lenders offered more conventional products with expanded underwriting criteria, the Mortgage Bankers Association said.

There was an 8% year-over-year increase in mortgage loan application defect risk in California during October and that should rise further because of the wildfires that devastated the state, First American said.