Technology

Foreclosure filings nationwide rose 3% in January from the month prior, a sign that improving delinquency rates may have a huge lag effect.

The average rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage held fast to its record-low rate of 3.87% for the third week in a row, according to Freddie Mac's primary market survey.

The pace of housing construction hit a three-year high in January as multifamily starts rose nearly 15% while single-family activity declined 1%, according to government figures released Thursday morning.

Mortgage applications declined 1% on a seasonally adjusted basis for the week ending February 10, driven by an almost 9% seasonally adjusted drop in purchase applications, according to figures compiled by the Mortgage Bankers Association.

Roughly 43% of borrowers with 30-year loans who refinanced into a new product during the fourth quarter chose shorter maturities, the highest reading since 2003.

Despite a shadow inventory of 1.6 million seriously delinquent loans, and a huge inventory of foreclosures, nearly 50% of 900 housing markets tracked by CoreLogic registered price gains last year.

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How oppressive are distressed sales to the housing market? Try this: The top 50 sellers of homes are banks, according to Jonathan Smoke of Housing Intelligence, the research arm of the Hanley Wood publishing company.

In these times where dispensing consumer credit has been akin to doing it through an eyedropper, the use of alternative data sources is one way to possibly increase the flow of money, one proponent said.

Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock Financial, is nobody's fool - not by a long shot. He cut his teeth at First Boston many moons ago, helped shape the MBS market, and then went on to create a financial services powerhouse: BlackRock