Technology

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.