The House Appropriations Committee has recommended $50 million to fund the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s FY 2018 housing counseling assistance to homebuyers, homeowners and low and moderate-income renters. The allocation is $3 million more than the Trump administration had requested and $5 million below the amount appropriated for housing counseling in fiscal year 2017. In its budget report, the committee noted the continued improvement in the economy, which has resulted in fewer foreclosures. Foreclosure filings from 2016 were reported on 933,000 properties, representing a 10-year low and a 14 percent reduction from 2015, the report pointed out. “The foreclosure rate has stayed within a historically normal range for three years, even with the pipeline of legacy foreclosures resulting from the housing bubble,” it said. In addition, the bill retains language that ...

Affordability and job availability are driving millennials to seek homes in more affordable markets, particularly in the upper Midwest, according to Ellie Mae data for the month of May. Ellie Mae’s Millennial Tracker, which monitors millennial mortgage applications during specific times, found that the higher percentages of loans made to millennial borrowers are in Hutchinson and Austin, MN, and Wahpeton and Williston, ND. Anniston-Oxford-Jacksonville, AL, rounded out the top-five markets. Ellie Mae defines millennials as applicants born between 1980 and 1999. Data showed that 48 percent of millennial borrowers who closed loans in May were single. In Hutchinson, for example, the majority of borrowers were single men. “This suggests millennials may be embracing homeownership in these areas for reasons other than what we have historically seen, which was family formation,” explained ...

Bipartisan Flood Bill Introduced in Senate. The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs will soon consider a bipartisan bill introduced this week that would keep the National Flood Insurance Program funded for six more years and create new risk mitigation procedures for communities to follow.Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, R-ID, and ranking Democrat Sherrod Brown, OH, said the bill would serve as a template for consideration by the whole committee. The Senate bill does not include core provisions in the House version, including the development of a private flood insurance market to complement the NFIP. In addition, the bill does not call for cuts in the reimbursement rate for Write-Your-Own flood-insurance carriers that service NFIP policies. However, amendments are likely, according to Crapo and Brown. Meanwhile, the ...

One reason the VA market grows somewhat faster than the FHA is that it loses fewer loans to default.

In a somewhat uncommon move, Progress increased a planned issuance after presale reports on the deal were already published.

The lender/servicer suffered another blow this spring when it revealed that some of its previously issued financial statements could not be relied upon because of what it called an “accounting error.”

GreenBox was the top contributor to the new nonprime MBS with Sprout Mortgage a close second…

The nation’s megabanks have started reporting second-quarter results, revealing a mixed bag when it comes to residential originations, according to a new analysis from Inside Mortgage Finance. The nation’s largest home lender, Wells Fargo, so far, has turned in the strongest performance of the group, funding $56.0 billion of product, a handsome 27.3 percent improvement from the first quarter of the year. Bank of America held its own with a 15.8 percent sequential improvement and U.S. Bank hiked its production game by a more modest 10.2 percent. And then there are...[Includes one data table]

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...

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...