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.

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.

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

A listing agent gets assigned a bank-owned listing in a great neighborhood. A week or two passes while the bank's asset manager determines a list price. Meanwhile, the listing agent fields telephone calls from prospective purchasers and other agents.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac finally gave lenders the green light on Monday that their automated underwriting systems are ready to process HARP 2.0 loans.

Builders pulled back on the construction of single-family homes in February but forged ahead with multifamily starts, according to new government figures released Tuesday morning.

As more submissions come in for our Top 150 Originator list, preliminary data shows we have a new leading producer for 2011. He is Eric Magee of Union Bank, with total volume of $234 million.

Declining mortgage rates during the fourth quarter fired up refinancings of high LTV loans guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to new Home Affordable Refinancing Program figures released Monday afternoon.

Since the start of the financial crisis in September 2008, mortgage companies and banks have foreclosed on roughly 3.3 million homes with no end in sight.

An AMC launched a new software that was developed on a platform as a service provided by customer relationship management technology provider Salesforce.com.

The growth of social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn has aided many mortgage originators in their ability to communicate with their customers. But for the companies they work for, these tools could be a compliance nightmare.

Software as a service is the original flavor of cloud computing and dates back to even before terms like cloud and SaaS were first used in information technology. In the mortgage industry, many lenders and servicers are just now warming up to the concept, educating themselves about the benefits, features and capacity of SaaS. But technology waits for no one.

In case you haven't been paying close attention and reading the National Mortgage News website (and our paper weekly) the past year, there's a gargantuan shift underway in the mortgage industry. We correctly predicted that the servicing side of the business is 'deconsolidating.'

Collateral Intelligence has signed on with FICO to provide valuation and support for the credit risk provider’s analytic solution that predicts borrowers who are at risk of strategically defaulting on their mortgages.

As if today's changing regulatory environment was not enough for the industry to contend with, the recent federal government and state attorneys general settlement for $25 billion with the country's top servicers has added a new wrinkle.

Even though national foreclosure filings decreased in February, 21 states posted annual increases in foreclosure activity, according to new figures compiled by RealtyTrac.

Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and three other residential servicers agreed to pay $25 million to New York State to resolve certain monetary claims over the use of the MERS database after reaching a $25 billion national settlement on robo-signing charges.

The National Council on Aging has created a new website, http://www.HomeEquityAdvisor.org, to help older adults make informed decisions regarding using their home as a tool to help finance their retirement lifestyle.

Don't count the mortgage brokerage sector out quite yet. Brokers captured 11.4% of the origination market in the fourth quarter, the highest market share reading since the third quarter of 2010, according to exclusive survey figures compiled by National Mortgage News and the Quarterly Data Report.

While home values continue to fall nationwide, rental rates are soaring in many Metropolitan Statistical Areas, according to Zillow’s latest real estate market report.