California's home builders suffered through their third lowest year on record in 2011. The only thing that kept the year from being worse was the apartment sector, which rose sharply.

GNMA chief Ted Tozer has been trying in vain to get more mortgage firms to issue MBS, but Wells Fargo & Co. continues to increase its grip on the government market.

Fannie Mae's final multifamily issuance numbers for 2011 are in and they reflect a 50% increase from the previous year, according to an executive at the government-sponsored enterprise.

Producing quality loan documents and maintaining the integrity of borrower data within them will be critical for both lenders and servicers as part of meeting new requirements.

Valuation Vision, a subsidiary of The Kirchmeyer Group, has launched a new product that acts as an alternative to a traditional broker price opinion.

VantageScore Solutions has stated that 46 investors, who run the gamut, are now using its consumer credit score model in their risk and pricing models.

With record low mortgage rates, decreasing home prices and relatively mild weather throughout the country, many states are experiencing home sale increases this winter compared to previous years.

One of the most surprising questions I get on a regular basis is "Why are you still talking about mortgage fraud? Hasn't it gone away now that property values are declining, lenders are requiring full documentation to support an application, and they are checking with the Internal Revenue Service to verify borrower income?" The short answer is: no.

Not only has the housing meltdown affected state and local governments, servicers and investors, but homeowner associations too. These associations rely upon property taxes to pay for such services as utilities, trash pickup, snow removal, landscaping, and road and building maintenance, but vacancies have mitigated the number of improvements made in these communities.

The total home equity held by U.S. senior citizens increased by $46 billion in the third quarter last year, to $3.19 trillion, according to the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association/Risk Span Reverse Mortgage Market Index.

The national delinquency rate remained at 8.15% at the end of December, the same as the prior month, according to Lender Processing Services' "first look" mortgage report.

Some AMCs are looking at the UAD as an opportunity to revisit quality control processes, updating them and streamlining them where possible. Those AMCs that are not taking advantage of this opportunity should be.

Warehouse lending is becoming less popular with some of the big players who have provided it, but remaining and new market participants find it can be profitable if they can get comfortable with the credit.

• Visions in the Cloud— Series on cloud computing

Despite seasonal trends where home sales usually decline during the winter months, December marked the sixth straight month with year-over-year gains, according to the latest figures released by RE/MAX.

The reverse mortgage loan origination business has matured to the point to where it needs a standardized loan data file format, said an executive with RMS, Houston.

An 11th-hour settlement is expected to stave off a potential class action status in a lawsuit that claims foreclosed borrowers were overcharged for attorneys’ fees that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. did not actually incur.

Strict underwriting standards and tighter credit conditions for mortgages are leading more borrowers to turn to friends and family for loans to help fund home purchases. But both borrowers and lenders both can run afoul of tax, legal and other complications if these personal loans aren’t structured properly.

A slim majority of Americans want the federal government to do more to help homeowners with troubled mortgages, according to a recent survey conducted by Yahoo Real Estate.

The nation's top five ranked residential funders, as a group, are continuing to lose production market share, but most of that loss can be attributed to one firm: Bank of America, which is deemphasizing mortgages.