The call-center business model used by Quicken Loans won praise from real estate agents who often prefer to deal with a local loan officer, according to the results of a new survey by Campbell Surveys and sponsored by Inside Mortgage Finance. “It is clear that agents like Quicken for loan programs, lead time on closing dates, policy on providing closing status to agents and performance on meeting closing dates,” said Tom Popik, research director for Campbell Surveys. He said...
United Guaranty last week filed papers for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission as a first step to split from its parent company, American International Group, Inc. UG, the mortgage insurance subsidiary of AIG, has filed a proposed aggregate offering of $100 million of common stock but pricing has not been determined. The IPO will not launch until later this year, but if the weak IPO market picks up soon, “it would change things a great deal,” according to an analysis by investment research firm Seeking Alpha. In late January, AIG announced...
Mortgage lending allies, free-market advocates and Congressional critics of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this week took issue with some of the CFPB’s most significant mortgage rules and its use of regulatory enforcement actions to establish policy they said would be more appropriately set in the traditional public notice and comment process. Former Federal Trade Commission official Todd Zywicki, now a law professor at George Mason University, told members of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee that many smaller banks have chosen to exit the mortgage market rather than bear the regulatory cost and risk associated with complying with the numerous mortgage regulations promulgated by the CFPB. Citing a survey of small banks conducted by GMU’s Mercatus Center, Zywicki said...
A potential shortage of residential real estate appraisers has some concerned that the decline could have far-reaching effects on the housing and mortgage industry. This prompted the Appraisal Foundation to issue a request for comment and examine possible changes to the recently revamped criteria used to qualify appraisers. While new criteria for becoming an appraiser went into effect in January 2015, the Appraiser Qualifications Board published a concept paper in July that was followed by a public hearing in October 2015 to voice its concern about the qualification criteria. Nationwide, the numbers of licensed appraisers has trended...
Pulte raised concerns about the way PulteGroup is being managed, including the relocation of the company’s headquarters from Detroit to Atlanta in 2013.
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