A federal court in Texas has dismissed a disparate-impact lawsuit against the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, finding, after years of litigation, that the plaintiff had failed to show sufficient reason for a charge of unlawful discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. The recent decision in The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. v. The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, et al., is the latest in a series of decisions applying the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that found disparate impact is a cognizable claim under the FHAct. The court’s Aug. 26 decision basically reaffirms...

Home prices in the U.S. are continuing to rebound – in some cases, nearing their peak before the housing market’s collapse, and in other cases, exceeding their peak. The trending data are stoking anxiety among some market observers that the American housing and mortgage markets are either already in, or dangerously close to, bubble territory. For example, the latest Home Price Index from Black Knight Financial Services now stands at an average of $256,000, up 32.6 percent from the market’s bottom and just 1.1 percent away from a new national peak, based on June 2016 residential real estate transactions. That figure is up 5.3 percent from year-ago levels. Further, home prices in six of the nation’s 20 largest states in mortgage activity reached...

More legal headaches for Ocwen? Looks that way...

Fair housing groups continue to press allegations that Bank of America has neglected foreclosed homes and created eyesores in African-American and Latino communities in more than 200 cities. The National Fair Housing Alliance, along with nine local fair housing organizations, filed an amended federal complaint against BofA last week. In the complaint they added a number of neighborhoods in six additional cities where investigations revealed foreclosed homes that have not been properly maintained. This brings...

For depositories, the data generally show more overall scrutiny from the CFPB as well…

Almost 53 percent of the loans in the bond are non-qualified mortgages and many of the rest are higher-priced QMs…

JPM, though, relies heavily on correspondent loan purchases to gather loans while Quicken bills itself as a direct-to-consumer/retail lender.

FBR & Co. raised its estimate on residential loan production for 2016: $1.90 trillion for 2016...

One agent noted: “Consumers around the country continue to receive inaccurate information at the closing table about their title insurance costs...”

Kingstown is known as a value-oriented hedge fund, with roughly $1.5 billion of assets under management.