A telling sign: Bank of America employed 6,603 servicing employees as of the end of 2016, down 78.0 percent compared to the end of 2013.

The biggest surge was in non-agency securitization of mortgages on hotels and other lodging properties, which jumped 88.7 percent from the first quarter.

Freddie expects to make a $2 billion dividend payment to Treasury – the holder of its senior preferred stock – sometime in September.

Freddie Mac CEO Don Layton: "The fundamentals are strong and residual flaws are gone..."

The noted research firm found that mortgage customers feel as if their servicers are more focused on profit than giving top-notch customer support...

“Some lenders are finally showing more willingness to extend credit to borrowers..." said FHFA Director Mel Watt.

The CFPB plans to make some significant, but unspecified, changes to its mortgage servicing rule sometime this fall, in response to concerns raised by the industry, the bureau revealed in a blog posting about its latest semiannual rulemaking agenda, released earlier this month. The document is current as of April 1, 2017, and does not reflect the bureau’s issuance of its arbitration final rule, its assessments of its mortgage servicing rule under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and its ability-to-repay rule, nor its proposed temporary increase in the institutional and transactional thresholds for home equity lines of credit. The agency said it is “considering concerns raised by industry participants regarding a few substantive aspects of the mortgage servicing rule ...

As the CFPB prepares to do the Dodd-Frank Act required assessment of its 2013 mortgage servicing rule under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, one industry trade group has urged the bureau to provide servicers with more regulatory guidance and clarifications of the current rule. The Consumer Mortgage Coalition said in a letter to the regulator that it has appreciated the opportunity to work with the bureau as it developed the final servicing requirements. “However, as the CFPB is aware, the final regulatory requirements are very prescriptive, yet unclear, and sometimes conflict with other statutory or regulatory requirements,” said the CMC. “In some areas of the regulation, the CFPB misunderstood the reason for the problems it was trying to solve ...

The U.S. House of Representatives voted recently to overturn the CFPB’s controversial arbitration rule, which is due to kick in Sept. 18. The final rule prohibits “covered providers of certain consumer financial products and services from using an agreement with a consumer that provides for arbitration of any future dispute between the parties to bar the consumer from filing or participating in a class action concerning the covered consumer financial product or service.” It also requires covered providers that are involved in an arbitration proceeding per a pre-dispute arbitration agreement to submit specified arbitral records as well as specified court records to the bureau. House Joint Resolution 111 utilized the authority of the Congressional Review Act to undo the rule ...

If Republicans in Congress are as successful in overturning the CFPB’s arbitration rule as they have been in canning the Affordable Care Act, various sectors of the financial services market could face a great deal of legal risk, according to one top attorney. “The irony here is that CFPB enforcement is frequently a factor in preventing private class-action litigation,” said Joseph Cioffi, chair of the insolvency, creditors’ rights and financial products practice group at the Davis & Gilbert law firm in New York City. “But this rule eliminating arbitration and the void left from President Trump’s moves toward deregulation can act like a supercollider for litigation against lenders, accelerating class actions and ricocheting through the credit markets.” He went on ...