Happy New Year? It is if you’re a mortgage attorney charging billable hours to lenders that are trying to make sense of an array of pending rules coming out of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other agencies.

Walter Investment Management Corp. is expanding its presence in the reverse market with an agreement to acquire Security One Lending (S1L), a California-based retail and wholesale reverse mortgage lender, in a stock-purchase deal valued at up to $31 million.

The American Bankers Insurance Association is calling upon the CFPB to reconsider the "force-placed" insurance notice provisions in the bureau's newly issued mortgage servicing rules, arguing they go beyond what the Dodd-Frank Act intended, could disrupt the market in unintended ways and have a negative effect on consumers. Force-placed insurance is coverage that the servicer buys on the property when the borrower no longer has property insurance. Without such coverage, whoever holds the mortgage would be at risk if the house were to be damaged or destroyed. But often the borrower may be responsible...

The CFPB has promulgated its loan originator compensation final rule, perhaps most notable for what it didn't include. Industry groups had urged the bureau to drop from the final rule its proposed "zero-zero alternative that would have required lenders to offer a loan option with no discount points or origination fees any time they offered a mortgage with such payment features. Industry representatives said...

Mortgage lenders saw a welcome decline in the volume of repurchases and indemnifications they had to make during the third quarter, but a new analysis of two major databases by Inside Mortgage Trends reveals that the industry made little progress in resolving the massive overhang of disputes involving loans from the depth of the housing crisis.

In a development that could inject turmoil and chaos into the CFPB’s regulatory sphere of influence, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has declared the three recess appointments President Barack Obama made to the National Labor Relations Board early last year to be unconstitutional. The judges said the appointments were illegitimate because the Senate was not actually in recess when they were made. “Considering the text, history and structure of the Constitution, these appointments were invalid from their inception,” the ruling stated. Here’s why this is...

A day before a federal appeals court declared his three recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board to be unconstitutional, President Barack Obama again nominated Richard Cordray to be the director of the CFPB, setting the stage for another potentially bitter confrontation with Republican opponents in the Senate. Obama made a recess appointment of Cordray to his current position at the same time he made his NLRB moves, early last year, bypassing the traditional Senate confirmation process in an end-around to fierce opposition from GOP members in the chamber. The problem for the president is...

Although the CFPB is done – for now – with its regulations governing what servicers can do regarding their residential mortgage customers, there’s still one area they intend to explore: servicing transfers. At a regulatory field hearing in Baltimore earlier this month, agency officials said they will look into the issue. How far it will go is another matter. “They’re definitely working...

The CFPB has issued its voluminous new national mortgage servicing final rules, including a host of required loss mitigation rules and processes and bringing a substantial amount of uniformity to a sector much maligned because of its controversial “robo-signing” practices. Under the rule, servicers will have to follow specified loss mitigation procedures for a mortgage loan secured by a borrower’s principal residence. If a borrower applies for a loss mitigation option, the servicer is generally required to acknowledge, within five days and in writing, that it has received the application and inform the borrower whether the application is complete. If the application is...

The CFPB decided to exempt small entities that service fewer than 5,000 loans and service only mortgages that they or an affiliate originated or own from a number of the requirements of its new mortgage servicing final rule. For instance, the bureau exempted small servicers from having to create and maintain new general servicing policies and procedures, and from having to issue monthly statements that would include more information than most community banks currently provide. The new rule also permits...