Mortgages

Administration officials are trying to get the Federal Housing Finance Agency to reconsider its resistance to principal reductions on loans purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told lawmakers Wednesday.

Any insight into the future of the mortgage industry given by the speakers at the Regional Conference of Mortgage Bankers Associations in Atlantic City was hazy at best. Because almost every speaker at the first morning's general session agreed that if there is any one word defining what it is happening in the business right now it is uncertainty.

The latest round of vendor consolidation in the LOS sector saw three mortgage technology heavy hitters acquire competing or complementary software developers in a series of moves that shook up the landscape of origination technology.

If you are like me and regularly post on Facebook, Twitter, blog pages, etc., there are some days that I have "brain farts," days where I simply can't think of anything to post.

As Chris Larsen steps aside as Prosper Marketplace Inc.'s chief executive, the company — and the rest of the peer-to-peer lending industry Larsen helped create — has the opportunity to change its course and possibly even merge with one of the very banks it originally sought to displace.

Mortgage bank scorecards are changing an industry that has not yet found the right balance between efficient rating standards and regulated oversight.

The Federal Housing Administration has revamped a little used program for refinancing underwater conventional loans, and extended its "short refinance" program until the end of 2014.

Sales of existing homes slipped 1% in February from the prior month on a seasonally adjusted basis, but rose 10% on a non-adjusted basis, according to new sales figures released Wednesday morning.

No matter how one looks at the current residential shadow inventory data it does not indicate improvement, even though the overall numbers remained flat at 1.6 million units as of January 2012, according to CoreLogic.

The total mortgage loan delinquency rate is 7.57% for February, down 5% from January's 7.97% and nearly 14% from February 2011, according to Lender Processing Services' "first look" at its monthly default data.

The title industry reported a drop of 1.5% in premiums written in 2011 over 2010, with the fourth quarter seeing a year-over-year decline of 6.5%, the American Land Title Association reported.

The acquisition of Bellwether Real Estate Capital LLC, Cleveland, by Enterprise Community Investment Inc., Columbia, Md., will allow the latter company to expand its activities to be a full service lender for community development activities, the executive who will head up the combination told National Mortgage News.

We still haven't heard from Wells Fargo & Co./Wells Fargo Funding about its exclusionary list of mortgage banking firms - lenders that it will not buy loans from in the secondary market. As you might imagine the story we published Tuesday about the topic caused quite a stir in the industry plus a ton of traffic to the National Mortgage News website.

Flagstar Bancorp Inc. increased its loss for the fourth quarter and 2011 by $4.2 million after revising a payment to settle claims regarding underwriting practices associated with loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration.

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The Federal Housing Finance Board has finally quashed private transfer fees, all but putting an end to the controversial add-on that opponents maintain is an unwarranted tax on home buyers, now and long into the future.

It would appear that rising interest rates are starting to affect new mortgage applications.

With Bank of America methodically dismantling the Countrywide home loan machine, someone else is going to have to service all the loans it used to buy. Who'll it be?

Warehouse lenders still feel mostly optimistic about their prospects for the remainder of the year, but a recent spike in rates is something that could throw ice water on their outlook.

Mortgage servicing industry executives have all been voicing their opinions recently about whether the REO-to-rental strategy initiated by the Federal Housing Finance Agency will help spur any type of housing recovery. Many have supported this initiative because renting properties is in greater demand now since many buyers are skeptical about the economy.