Mortgages

Home Savings of America in Little Falls, Minn., has scuttled - for now - its merger with Cornerstone Mortgage after one of the bank's private equity investors backed out of the deal, according to a memo provided to National Mortgage News.

Single-family housing starts rose 2.4% in November on a sequential basis while multifamily starts jumped 32%, according to a new government report.

American Home Mortgage Servicing, a company controlled by investor Wilbur Ross, recently explored buying the wholesale division of MetLife Home Loans, but for now has put the idea on hold, according to industry advisors familiar with the matter.

It looks like Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller won't be getting his Christmas wish this year. Miller, who is leading the settlement talks with the top five mortgage servicers, said earlier this month that the settlement should be reached by the holiday.

Fitch Ratings has upgraded its outlook for the title industry to stable from negative, but that is because the weak market conditions expected to affect industry profitability in 2012 are largely reflected in the current ratings.

We've all heard the cliché quote about death and taxes. But for the small business owner (which defines many mortgage company owners), getting ready to do their taxes (and we can skip the cliché about render unto Caesar as well) is something that falls to the bottom of the list as the year ends.

Home sales fell 5.7% in November but prices were up month over month, according to new figures released by RE/MAX.

Fannie Mae's chief economist is warning that the United States has a 40% chance of slipping into a double-dip recession in 2012.

The Senate over the weekend added an increase in FHA premiums to the payroll tax bill, passing the measure by an overwhelming margin of 89-10.

Tom Palmer, a senior executive in the correspondent lending division of MetLife Home Loans, recently left the company, accepting a position with the privately held Freedom Mortgage Corp., Fishers, Ind., according to industry officials familiar with the matter.

Residential lenders issued $28.4 billion of Government National Mortgage Association-backed MBS in November, a 7% gain from the previous month, according to new figures issued by the agency.

Commercial REIT Vornado Realty Trust has acquired a 49.5% stake in 666 Fifth Ave., a 39-story office building in Manhattan, from the Kushner Cos.

Redwood Trust said it is currently seeing a very robust pipeline of potential CMBS transactions.

Members of a House Financial Services subcommittee are at odds over how to address conflict of interest issues involving the servicing of first and second mortgages.

Just imagine what a 10 basis point guarantee fee hike would do to the market for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans. Well, apparently, the mortgage insurance industry has done quite a bit of imagining and has managed to get language added to the payroll tax bill that seeks parity between g-fee hikes for Fannie/Freddie, and GNMA.

The storm surge of foreclosed properties on bank books shows little indication of ebbing, and institutions continue to be drowned by it.

CHICAGO - Good training comes from having good recruiting practices, declared one panelist at the "Best Practices in Sales Training" session at the Mortgage Bankers Association's annual convention here.

There are a few maxims we have all heard over the years regarding customer retention, including that it is cheaper to keep a current client than it is to have to find a new one.

A funny thing happened on the way to the mortgage correction: while residential debt outstanding has been declining steadily for well over a year, subservicing contracts have increased - handsomely.

Bensalem, Pa.-based ISGN provides outsourced services for mortgage originators and servicers, and as such its staff needs to meet the same licensing and training requirements that the in-house staff at the companies which hire it need to meet, one of its top executives noted.