Mortgages

The housing finance system must be given back to the companies that make mortgages and the borrowers who use them to buy homes, keynote speakers said at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Secondary Market Conference.

Citing a lack of transparency for both consumers and mortgage professionals, Experience 1 Inc. and its operating units Advantage Title and Title365 have come out with a new online platform Title365.com.

Warehouse club Costco Wholesale started partnering with banks to offer mortgage services online last year, and it wants to get into auto lending and, perhaps, student loans.

HARP 2.0 is hot – or so we keep hearing. Late last year the Treasury Department finally found the keys to the HARP kingdom: take the loan-to-value ratio girdle totally off the patient and see what happens.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency closed Security Bank in North Lauderdale, Fla., on Friday, bringing the total number of failures so far in 2012 to 23.

Las Vegas-area home sales rose in March to a level not seen in six years.

An American Bankers Association-sponsored mortgage cooperative that sells loans to a select number of investors is looking for new partners.

While bankers remain concerned about the activities of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, they should take some comfort from a recent suggestion by the agency's director, Richard Cordray, that the regulation of nonbank institutions is a top priority.

HSBC Bank USA said that it has inked a deal to transfer roughly $52 billion of residential servicing rights to PHH Corp., which also will absorb two-thirds of its mortgage work force.

A timeline Acting FHFA director Ed DeMarco provided to Congress in March targets September as the date for the first single-family risk-sharing deals. But the question boils down to this: What will Fannie and Freddie come up with and will it be profit-enticing enough for the private sector jump on board?

Vacant and deteriorated homes that are not being maintained properly continues to negatively affect the national housing market.

In the May issue of Origination News, we published our annual ranking of the mortgage industries leading originators by volume. There is also a listing of top originators by units. Christopher Vincent Hussain repeated as the No. 1 originator.

One has to be particularly careful to have the right mix of quality, technology and speed when it comes to managing valuations, contractor networks and FHA product in particular, according to three respective experts in these areas.

There may be a simple reason why Wells won’t buy mortgages from a certain lender.

The lending industry would face “disparate-impact” liability for Fair Housing Act violations under a rule recently proposed by HUD.

Ocwen Financial Corp., which has been gobbling up billions of dollars of mortgage servicing rights the past two years, earned $19.3 million in the first quarter, a 13% decline from the year ago period.

Residential originations may have fallen by more than 10% last year, but don’t tell that to community banks that rely on Mortgage Solutions, a subsidiary of the American Bankers Association.

Ginnie Mae wants to provide more loan-level data to its MBS investors so they can determine if the underlying mortgages were originated through a mortgage broker or some other third-party channel.

United Guaranty Corp., the mortgage insurance subsidiary of American International Group, had operating income of $8 million in the first quarter, down from $14 million for the same period in 2011.