It hasn’t been a pretty month for Walter Investment Management, the publicly traded parent company of the nation’s eighth largest servicer. And it could get even uglier by the time summer is out. Not only is Walter in danger of being kicked off the New York Stock Exchange – for having a share price of less than $1.00 for too many days – but investors appear to have given up on the company and the idea that a restructuring, now in progress, will yield positive results. If Walter is...
Affiliated business arrangements may not be dead after all. Late last week, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky ruled that such a network at the heart of a lawsuit brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was in fact legitimate as constituted under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. In this case, which the bureau brought four years ago, the agency accused the Borders & Borders law firm of Louisville, KY, and its principals, Harry Borders, John Borders Jr. and J. David Borders, of illegally paying kickbacks for real estate settlement referrals through a network of shell companies. According to the CFPB’s complaint, the law firm operated...
Wells Fargo plans to increase originations by putting an emphasis on interest-only mortgages, according to John Shrewsberry, the bank’s CFO. “We are making some modest changes to generate new loan originations, including offering interest-only jumbo mortgage loans to high quality borrowers,” Shrewsberry said late last week during Wells’ earnings call for the second quarter. Wells had...
Home prices aren’t increasing nearly as much as they have in other times when the inventory of homes for sale was low, according to analysts at Capital Economics. They suggest that “cautious” appraised values and tight underwriting by lenders have limited home price appreciation. Home prices are currently rising at an annual rate of around 6.0 percent. According to Capital Economics, current inventory levels and the measure of buyer and seller traffic separately suggest that annual house price growth should currently exceed 10.0 percent. “Although there is no hard data on the subject, we suspect one factor is that cautious home appraisers are preventing larger price gains,” the analysts said. Since early 2015, appraised home values have...
With the new data collection and reporting requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act now less than six months away, anxious industry calls for regulatory relief met with some limited success recently, while others continue to urge a broader extension of the implementation period. Late last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau relented somewhat, proposing to temporarily ease HMDA reporting requirements for lenders that make a small number of home equity lines of credit. The agency proposed raising the threshold for HELOC reporting from 100 loans to 500 loans, starting in January 2018. Officials acknowledged they may have...
The House Appropriations Committee this week approved a fiscal year 2018 funding bill for the Department of Housing and Urban Development with a $135 million allocation for systems enhancements, quality control and risk management improvements in lieu of a proposed lender fee. Approved by a vote of 31 to 20, the bill provides HUD with $38.3 billion in discretionary funding for FY 2018, down $487 million from the current level. The House measure authorizes...
In a recent ruling, the Nevada Supreme Court decided that in the case of Nationstar Mortgage, LLC v. SFR Investments Pool 1, LLC, a homeowner’s association priority lien cannot extinguish a first deed of trust in an HOA foreclosure sale. This is a win for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Twenty-two states have super-lien laws that allow HOAs to take priority over first mortgages and foreclose the property to collect unpaid fees of up to six months’ worth. In 2014, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled that an HOA could indeed extinguish a senior mortgage. But Nationstar Mortgage argued...
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