Mortgages

Cash-out refinancings hit a 26-year low in the fourth quarter as 85% of borrowers maintained the same loan amount or reduced their principal balance after refinancing, according to a new report by Freddie Mac.

National home prices fell for the fifth consecutive year as they were down 4.7% at the end of 2011 compared to December 2010, according to a CoreLogic report.

Freddie Mac saw its 2011 multi-family volume increase by 32% over 2010 to more than $20 billion. Of that total, $16.5 billion, or 81%, of new purchase volume was through the Capital Markets Execution program – the largest annual volume amount to date.

Most mortgage rates returned to record low levels during the week ending Feb. 2, according to Freddie Mac's weekly rate report.

Fannie Mae did $24 billion of multi-family mortgages last year, of which 98% were put into mortgage-backed securities. The leading Delegated Underwriting and Servicing program originator was Wells Fargo Bank NA.

The Mortgage Bankers Association's annual convention was set for Orlando in 2005. So far, so good. I'd been to a million meetings in Orlando, and here was one more. The trouble was, Florida was also set for a visit at the same time by a monster hurricane named Wilma.

CitiMortgage is throwing its wholesale division overboard – again. Readers of the National Mortgage News website (and weekly) might recall that two years ago Citi scaled back its broker channel significantly only to re-grow it a bit. But at last check, wholesale production accounted for just 10% of its overall production and some brokers I talked to are not sorry to see them go.

The mortgage division of Ally Financial Inc., originated $16.5 billion of new loans in the fourth quarter, a small gain from 3Q, but a 29% drop from the same period in 2011, according to new figures released Thursday morning.

The analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods predict investors would be willing to take on more interest rate risk in light of the Federal Reserve Board's intention to keep rates low through 2014 and that should keep their interest in mortgage real estate investment trusts growing.

In the movie "Groundhog Day", Bill Murray is forced to live the same day over and over again until he begins to change his choices. Today, many loan officers might be feel as doomed as Murray even after writing their 2012 production goals. Nothing has really changed and today is the same as yesterday.

The Mortgage Bankers Association, in a new forecast, estimates that residential loan production will total $992 billion this year, a 20% decline from 2011. The biggest driver of the decline is weaker refinancings.

Home sales in some of our nation’s hardest hit markets are showing signs of recovery. This is great news for the industry, especially if estimates are true and we still have years’ worth of housing industry that has yet to reach the market.

There is vast speculation among many real estate analysts that short sales will be very prevalent this year as delinquencies and foreclosures continue to be a major problem throughout the country.

Among new Obama Administration moves to aid housing is a pilot program aimed at helping certain rural borrowers refinance to reduce their payments.

With Bank of America shedding mortgage servicing rights en masse, and a handful of other megabanks writing down their MSRs because of Basel III, prepayments and other concerns, one might think that the asset must stink to high heaven. Well, think again.

As might be expected, the American Bankers Association is none-too-thrilled with a new White House plan to tax banks to pay for a new government refinancing program.

It would appear that home prices just can't catch a break. According to preliminary sales figures collected by Lender Processing Services, house prices fell 0.8% in December following similar declines in November and October.

After significantly reducing its geographic footprint in November, Google “discontinued” its mortgage rate advertising platform Wednesday, just two years after the search engine entered the online rate search and lead generation market.

Suzanne Ball, president of America's Infomart, a field services company based in Dallas, plans to be at the MBA National Mortgage Servicing Conference to check the pulse of her peers on loan information security issues.

CitiMortgage, the nation's sixth largest residential wholesaler, Wednesday afternoon informed its loan brokers that it will cease table funding loans next week as it prepares to exit the channel.