VA Home Loan Guaranty has issued clarification regarding title requirements for manufactured or mobile homes conveyed to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Effective immediately, VA is requiring proof of noteholders’ compliance with the agency’s requirements for guaranteed mobile-home financing. Foreclosure title packages that do not include the required documents will be rejected, the agency warned. Under federal law, a manufactured home must be permanently affixed and classified as real property in the state where it is located. VA will not guarantee financing if the property does not meet the criteria. To ensure that a guaranty claim is fully payable and that the holder has the option to convey the manufactured home to VA, servicers must ensure that home loans with a VA guarantee meet federal requirements. Under the clarified VA guidelines, servicers may submit the ...

New FHA guidance for dealing with mortgages with a Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) obligation went into effect last week but uncertainty lingers and its full impact remains to be seen, according to an industry attorney. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has issued guidance specifically allowing properties encumbered by a PACE lien to be eligible for FHA mortgage financing for both purchase and refinance loans. The department of Veterans Affairs has issued similar guidance. According to Erika Sonstroem, an attorney with the law firm Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, the PACE industry is touting the guidance in its pitches to lenders as posing no risk to mortgage investors. PACE is a program that lends money to homeowners for home-energy savings projects. It is treated much like a tax lien on a property and is included in the ...

The improved numbers suggest that the industry’s fears those rules would crush or even depress the market somewhat were overblown.

The Wells account and credit card scandal did not involve mortgages, but the bank is the nation’s largest overall home funder and retail originator.

A group of 13 publicly traded lenders reported a combined $1.72 billion in production and secondary marketing income for the second quarter.

Altisource’s stock price declined by 6.4 percent to $30.77 per share shortly after the charges were announced, but the stock has rebounded somewhat…

Meanwhile, if you want to know where Clinton and Trump stand on the issue of homeownership in America, you can review their respective party platforms...

Impac Mortgage Holdings late last week came to market with a “follow-on” offering of 3 million shares of common stock, the first public equity sale by a pure-play mortgage company in almost three years. Unfortunately, investors were not happy. When the shares hit the New York Stock Exchange last Friday, not only did Impac’s stock price tumble almost 9.0 percent, but it has continued to drift downward, resting at just over $13.00 a share as Inside Mortgage Finance went to press this week. The share price of the nation’s 28th largest originator hit...

An increasing share of purchase mortgages have missed their scheduled closing dates in recent months, according to the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey. Many of the delays are tied to a shortage of appraisers as home sale activity increased during the spring and summer. Just before the start of the spring home-buying season, the on-time share of closings was at high levels for mortgage-financed purchases. Some 76.6 percent of purchases in April with a low downpayment mortgage securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac closed on time, based on a three-month moving average. The on-time closing share has declined...

Some residential mortgage-backed securities loan originators are moving away from performing internal post-acquisition quality control loan reviews in lieu of obtaining feedback from their whole loan investors, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service. “Some aggregators are relying more on their investors for quality control feedback,” said Moody’s. The ratings service identified in particular Redwood Residential Acquisition Corp. and JPMorgan Mortgage Acquisition Corp., which it said “are relying more on feedback from whole loan investors to monitor the quality of due diligence firm loan reviews, as opposed to conducting their own internal reviews, since a large portion of their acquisitions are sold in whole-loan trades.” Moody’s noted...