Mortgages

Freddie Mac purchased $30.7 billion in residential mortgages from lenders in May, up 19% from April.

The S&P Case-Shiller house price index rose 1.3% in April for the first time since August.

National Mortgage News has won a Native American Journalists Association award for an editorial that took the administration and Congress to task for seesawing widely on the amount of money granted to tribes to support housing.

A consumer protection clinic has been started by the California mortgage settlement monitor at the UC Irvine School of Law to help ensure state homeowners receive the proper mortgage relief as promised from the nation’s five largest servicers.

Pity the poor loss mitigation staffs at the mortgage servicers everywhere—they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

A loan officer for a Florida mortgage company was sentenced to more than four years in prison for pleading guilty to committing wire fraud in a $9.2 million mortgage fraud scam.

OK, one borrower wrote his lender he couldn't make his mortgage paymentbecause he'd been bitten by a spider. That can happen to anyone, right? But he didn't make his payment the second or third month, either.

Community bankers are looking longingly at construction loans’ relatively generous returns. What they are not seeing are the higher risk weightings that may soon go along with such assets.

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston is teaming up bank employees with student volunteers from Bike & Build, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to construct affordable housing across the nation through cross-country bicycle trips that benefit affordable housing developers.

It happens nearly every day in retail mortgage sales operations—a loan officer, underwriter, processor, closer and/or assistant gets what they feel is "the phone call from the customer from hell."

The Senate is slated to take up and debate a National Flood Insurance Program bill that extends the program for five years.

The Census Bureau reported that sales of newly built single-family homes rose to a 369,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate in May from a 343,000 rate in April.

Old Republic International Corp. said it has withdrawn the spinoff of its mortgage insurance and consumer credit indemnity businesses into a separately traded company called Republic Financial Indemnity Group.

Supporters of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are dismissing a new lawsuit that seeks to abolish the agency as a political stunt, and even bank industry insiders who would like the case to succeed are privately calling it an uphill battle.

California pending home sales for May were flat from April, but posted double-digit gains from a year ago for the fourth straight month.

The rental sector’s run at the top of the housing ladder has more staying power than most observers believe.

There are basically three processes involved in successful selling. First, the sales person needs to find someone interested in their product or service. Once that’s done, the sales person needs to convince the prospect that he/she should be the one to accomplish their needs.

Ratings agency presale reports came out last week on the latest deal from Sequoia/Redwood, the only consistent issuer/aggregator of nonagency/jumbo securitizations.

Mortgage technology vendor Ellie Mae will offer 3 million shares of its stock in a public offering announced Monday.

Only hours after regulators released federal guidelines detailing how much homeowners would receive for wrongful foreclosure actions due to banks' mortgage servicing failures, consumer advocates were up in arms.