First Horizon announced on Thursday that its regional bank agreed to a $212.5 million settlement with the Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The settlement relates to First Tennessee Bank’s underwriting and origination of FHA-insured mortgages from 2006 through 2008.

Mortgage brokers played an increasingly important role in the conventional conforming market during the first quarter of 2015, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Mortgage brokers were responsible for $23.8 billion of single-family mortgages securitized by the two government-sponsored enterprises during the first three months of this year. That was up 16.0 percent ... [Includes two data charts]

Banks and thrifts reported a 10.3 percent increase in mortgage repurchases and indemnifications during the fourth quarter of 2014 compared with the previous quarter, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data. Despite the late-year uptick, 2014 still ranked as the most benign for the industry since banks began reporting repurchases in 2008. Institutions repurchased or made indemnifications totaling just $4.25 billion ... [Includes one data chart]

Repurchase requests on new production are few and far between, according to the government-sponsored enterprises. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both recently issued reviews of their quality control processes, noting that lenders have plenty of tools to help ensure loan quality and avoid buybacks. Carlos Perez, a senior vice president and chief credit officer for single-family business at Fannie, said that as of the end of 2014, 0.33 percent of the single-family ...

As a new day of mortgage disclosure practices nears, courtesy of the integrated disclosure rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a strong supporter of eClosings and eMortgages – Fannie Mae – is extending the concept. The government-sponsored enterprise is working on eWarehouse lending in conjunction with eNotes. First, the borrower executes the eNote on a digital closing platform. “The closing system applies a tamper-evident seal to the eNote,” Fannie said ...

Broker originations delivered to the GSEs increased by 16.0 percent in the first quarter of 2015 compared with the previous quarter, the biggest gain among the three production channels.

Some 32 percent of first-time homebuyers said that referrals from friends, family or co-workers had a major influence on their choice of lender, compared with only 18 percent of repeat homebuyers.

The CFPB brought an enforcement action against RMK Financial Corp., a California-based mortgage lender, for allegedly using deceptive mortgage advertising practices, including ads that led consumers to believe that the company was affiliated with the U.S. government.

The Department of Veterans Affairs will continue removing barriers to delivering home-loan benefits to veterans and service members in 2015, focusing more on further improvements in appraisal and servicing.

George Mason University real estate professor Anthony Sanders, a former head of asset-backed and mortgage-backed securities research at Deutsche Bank, took issue this week with a recent report from the Urban Institute which suggested that residential mortgage credit is still too tight because there are 4 million fewer mortgages originated this year than in 2001, before the housing bubble.