For Chicago’s Cole Taylor Bank, what a difference a year makes. Last week, Taylor Capital Group, the $4.7 billion holding company of Cole Taylor Bank, announced a major expansion of the bank’s retail mortgage unit with the hiring of 60 loan officers. The expansion will nearly double the number of Cole Taylor Mortgage retail origination offices and represents...

Homeowners who received foreclosure counseling through the federally funded National Foreclosure Mitigation Counseling program obtained loan modifications that resulted in significantly lower monthly mortgage payments than they would have received without counseling, according to NeighborWorks America. The program has helped reduce borrowers’ monthly payments on their homes by an average of $2,100 in annual savings for each counseled homeowner. This represented more than $372 million in annual savings to homeowners who received...

In the era of new consumer protection laws and the emergence of the Consumer Financial Protection Board, many community banks and independent mortgage lenders find themselves stuck in a morass of confusing regulations and guidance, concerned whether they can pass a tough CFPB audit. While these financial institutions have been through regulatory audits before, they have not been confronted by a government audit the size and scope of a CFPB compliance examination. The biggest concerns are whether their compliance process is up to CFPB standards, whether compliance is properly and adequately documented, and whether...

Members of Congress from both sides of the political divide remain concerned about the cost of real estate appraisals and consumer access to the people who perform them, as well as the overall effectiveness of the regulatory regime that oversees it all. “I believe that the appraisal process is absolutely essential and so important to the mortgage process because we know a sound regulatory structure in which the industry can operate and serve the consumer is of prime importance,” said Rep. Shelly Moore Capito, R-WV, during a hearing this week of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Insurance, Housing and Community Opportunity. Capito is questioning whether the Appraisal Subcommittee of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council can...

Tentative signs of stability in home prices in early 2012 have yet to spur a rebound in home-equity lending, as the outstanding balance of second mortgages fell to its lowest level in seven years. According to the Federal Reserve, the supply of home-equity loans fell 2.7 percent in the first quarter of 2012 to just $849.5 billion. The home-equity market, which includes home-equity lines of credit and closed-end second mortgages, has shrunk by 24.9 percent since peaking...(Includes three data charts)

The lure of discount pricing combined with the hassle of tough mortgage underwriting standards appears to be pushing more homebuyers away from mortgage financing and toward all-cash home purchases, the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey results suggest. According to the new HousingPulse data, the share of homebuyers relying on all-cash transactions climbed to a record high 35.2 percent in May. That was up from a 30.7 percent level a year ago and...

Federal banking regulators last week released their Financial Remediation Framework for independent foreclosure review consultants to use in determining the compensation due homeowners financially injured by servicers’ foreclosure practices in 2009 and 2010, generally capping damages at $125,000 but allowing borrowers to pursue litigation if they so choose. “The guidance helps ensure that similarly situated borrowers who suffered financial injury as a result of errors in foreclosure actions on their homes are treated similarly,” said the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which issued the guidance in conjunction with the Federal Reserve Board. Under the framework, remediation could include lump-sum payments; suspension or rescission of a foreclosure; the provision of...

Old Republic International Corp.’s top management said it is postponing indefinitely plans to reenter the mortgage guaranty market after cancelling a planned spinoff and reversing the partial leveraged buyout of its subsidiary, Republic Financial Indemnity Group. In a conference call this week, ORI Chief Executive Officer Aldo Zucaro stood by the company’s decision to withdraw the registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in May for spinning off RFIG common stock to ORI shareholders. He said stakeholders, including the North Carolina Department of Insurance, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, banks, debtholders and shareholders, rejected...

For the second time in less than a year, Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s conservator has gone to court in Illinois to assert that the two federally chartered government-sponsored enterprises are exempt from certain local and state property assessments. Last week, the Federal Housing Finance Agency filed suit in the U.S. District Court Northern District of Illinois, Western Division, against the Illinois Department of Revenue and county clerks to block local government efforts to collect real estate transfer taxes from Fannie and Freddie. The FHFA suit was in response to litigation filed by DeKalb County and five other counties to compel...

The reallocation of hundreds of millions of dollars of funds paid by the nation’s five largest loan servicers to states as part of this year’s whopping $25 billion national foreclosure settlement has ignited intra-state feuding as to how best utilize the cash windfall, according to a mortgage industry attorney. During a webinar sponsored last week by the State Attorneys General Enforcement Network, Jeremiah Buckley, founding partner of BuckleySandler, noted “emerging controversies” among state elected officials as they do battle, in some cases via the courts, to ensure the funds are used for consumer/mortgage-related purposes. The landmark agreement finalized in April between Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo with a coalition of state attorneys general...