State regulators

Housing and the mortgage industry are every bit as important to the U.S. as the national transportation or healthcare systems.

A mortgage title company and a handful of individuals are being sued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Maryland Attorney General related to an alleged mortgage kickback scheme with banks such as Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase.

Cornerstone Home Lending surrendered its state mortgage license in Georgia and will pay $33,500 under the terms of a consent order reached with state banking regulators.

NewDay Financial found itself embroiled in another regulatory order, this time stemming from allegations of rampant cheating on mortgage licensing examinations by company employees, including its chief operating officer.

The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs awarded contracts to Matt Martin Real Estate Management and Waterman Steele Real Estate Advisors to help the state agency handle its real estate portfolio.

All areas identified by the CFPB in its supervisory report have particular relevance to the mortgage industry, and lenders should review their compliance with the large-scale subject matter areas that the CFPB is committed to enforcing.

The bill would require written contract amendments, signed by the lender, for most loans. Legislators took up the issue after a judge in the state sided with a borrower's claim of having an oral agreement from Bank of America to modify a mortgage.

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the second-largest servicer of U.S. mortgages, is buying the right to handle $45 billion of home loans from Ocwen Financial Corp., according to a person familiar with the transaction.

Compliance with data security requirements can be affected by the layout of your office.

Some nonbanks feel capital requirements discourage diversification among market participants and their participation in the market because they put more constraints on their financial options and bar smaller players.

Panelists at the MBA's mortgage servicing conference said that the best way for servicers to keep federal regulators off their backs is to be responsive consumer complaints. And if a state attorney general or regulator come knocking, it’s best to be responsive and cooperative.

It's not quite too big to fail, but Ocwen is the country's largest servicer of subprime mortgages. So if it were forced to sell itself, or even failed, the transfer of some $410 billion in servicing rights could create havoc in the mortgage market, industry experts said.

Ocwen Financial has tentatively agreed to sell a mortgage-servicing portfolio on $9.8 billion of loans to Nationstar Mortgage Holdings, and Ocwen hinted that more deals may be in the offing.

They're called "zombie properties" — dilapidated, abandoned and overgrown with weeds because the lending institutions inheriting them through foreclosure fail to maintain them.

The expiration of the federal Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act leaves servicers dealing with a patchwork of state laws and investor rules, while renters living in REO properties are at a greater risk of eviction.

You can get a jump on taking preventive and proactive measures against defaults in order to mitigate risk and retain portfolio assets. Here's how.

McGraw Hill Financial Inc., the U.S. Justice Department and state attorneys general will announce a $1.4 billion settlement Tuesday over claims that Standard & Poor's inflated ratings on subprime mortgage bonds leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, according to two people with knowledge of the deal.

Homeowners associations seeking unpaid dues are seizing on a court decision allowing them to foreclose on properties ahead of banks, and the FHFA is litigating to defend Fannie and Freddie mortgages. Private lenders, meanwhile, are trying to keep the problem from spreading to more states.

Ocwen Financial Corp., one of the biggest U.S. mortgage servicers, rejected as "groundless" accusations by an investor group that the company’s practices created defaults on home-loan bonds backed by debt it oversees.

California's Department of Business Oversight said Friday that it will drop its effort to suspend Ocwen Loan Servicing's mortgage license in California. The Atlanta servicer had failed for more than a year to provide its California regulator with requested information