Analyst Henry Coffey: “It is worth noting, given expected home price appreciation, that a flat mortgage market should translate into a 4 percent or greater decline in actual mortgage unit count.”
Mortgage servicing delays have caused the Department of Housing and Urban Development to pay a whopping $413 million for unnecessary interest and other expenses. The payment put a major dent on the FHA Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund and its ability to pay other claims or reduce FHA mortgage-insurance premiums, according to a report from the HUD inspector general. The amount covered interest payments and other costs on 27,634 preforeclosure claims over a five-year period. The costly setback could have been avoided had lenders completed servicing chores on defaulted FHA loans within their prescribed periods, the IG said. Although serviers were to blame, HUD reimbursed them through FHA insurance claims. The IG analyzed 100,077 preforeclosure claims paid from Aug. 1, 2012, through July 31, 2017. Auditors identified 30,061 claims that had ...
The federal statute that authorized the Department of Housing and Urban Development to establish the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage program addresses only HUD’s authority to insure reverse mortgages and not the lender’s contractual right to foreclose, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has ruled. Affirming the district court’s decision in The Estate of Caldwell Jones, Jr., Executrix Vanessa Jones and Leah Grace Jones, Minor v. Live Well Financial Inc., the circuit court determined that the HECM statute did not prevent foreclosure pursuant to a reverse-mortgage contract originated before Aug. 4, 2014, even if the non-borrowing spouse continued to live in the mortgaged property. The question before the court was whether the statute can be read broadly to prevent foreclosure after the borrower’s death and prevent the non-borrowing spouse from being ejected from the ...
Inadequate loan-servicing controls put the Department of Housing and Urban Development at risk of not being able to collect $6 million in partial claim notes, an inspector general audit revealed. The audit found that HUD’s National Servicing Center did not do a good job tracking partial claim notes for future collection. More specifically, NSC did not always enter partial claim notes and lender payments into its tracking system to ensure that note and mortgage documents supported the partial claim notes. The audit was triggered by an earlier IG pre-audit analysis, which found that partial claim notes may not have been properly uploaded in HUD’s Single-Family Mortgage Asset Recovery Technology (SMART) tracking system. HUD data showed there were 407,984 partial claims between Jan. 1, 2013, and Aug. 31, 2017. The department reviewed 695 non-sampled FHA loans with partial ...
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