The volume of home mortgages outstanding continued to grow during the final three months of 2016, no thanks to the commercial banking industry.

The three major credit bureaus plan to exclude two critical pieces of negative information from their reports, which may make it easier for some borrowers to qualify for a mortgage. Many tax liens and civil judgments, which can weigh down a credit score, will be removed. As part of a multi-year plan to alleviate incorrect information, on July 1, Equifax, Experian and Transunion will apply new public record standards when it comes to collecting and the timely updating of civil judgments and tax liens, the Consumer Data Industry Association said this week. The new standard will apply...

A request from two consumers for changes to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act would interfere with mortgage origination and servicing operations, according to the Consumer Mortgage Coalition. The CMC submitted a comment letter to the Federal Communications Commission late last week in response to a petition submitted to the FCC in January. The petition called for the FCC to re-write parts of the TCPA and require express consent to be in writing from consumers regarding certain communications from companies, including mortgage lenders and servicers. The petition would define express consent as not being provided even when a person to be called knowingly provides a phone number to a lender on a loan application. Anne Canfield, executive director of the CMC, said...

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae securitized $183.69 billion of newly originated mortgages produced through the wholesale-broker channel last year, a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis reveals. That was up 22.2 percent from 2015 volume, the biggest increase among the three mortgage-production channels. The biggest increase for broker originations was in Fannie mortgage-backed securities, rising 31.5 percent from 2015, accounting for 12.2 percent of the government-sponsored enterprise’s MBS issuance last year. The dataset includes only purchase and refinance loans that were securitized within six months of origination, and it excludes mortgages with no channel identification. Brokers earned...[Includes two data tables]

The banking industry continued to backpedal away from the business of servicing home mortgages for other investors during 2016, according to an exclusive new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data....

The Mortgage Bankers Association this week urged Congress to support two bills that would make major changes to the National Flood Insurance Program, including clarification that would make private flood insurance acceptable to mortgage lenders....

Mortgage applications rose 3.1 percent, on a seasonally adjusted basis, for the week ending March 10, 2017, versus the week before, the Mortgage Bankers Association announced Wednesday morning. The MBA's Refinance Index rose 4 percent, and its Purchase Index was up 2 percent…

Correspondent production of conventional-conforming mortgages increased by 51.9 percent from 2015 to 2016.

The Trump administration has subtly signaled its support for PHH Corp. in the mortgage lender’s long-running dispute with the CFPB over alleged violations of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. In recent days, the Department of Justice asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for permission to file an amicus brief in the case by March 17, one week after the deadline the court had given PHH to file its response to the court’s decision to grant the CFPB’s request for an en banc rehearing.The court has since granted the administration’s request for the one-week extension. In its request, the Justice Department said, “As this court recognized in calling for the views of the ...

The attorneys general of 15 states came to the defense of PHH Corp. and related parties in their case with the CFPB over the agency’s interpretation and enforcement of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act.The AGs of Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin focused on the constitutional issues in the case, with not a single mention of the statutory questions related to the act. The AGs made three major arguments in support of PHH’s position. First, they asserted that the separation of powers plays a critical role in preserving the division of authority within the federal system, and the CFPB’s governance structure violates the separation of powers ...