Banks maintain huge reserves of roughly $21.3 billion to cover residential loan repurchase requests, Inside Mortgage Trends discovered.

Due diligence was completed on 33 percent of the loans by American Mortgage Consultants. The firm found compliance exceptions regarding Truth in Lending Act requirements, right to cancel and HUD-1 forms.

Bexil American Mortgage and its subsidiary appear to be in a growth mode. They're looking to buy a retail lender and MSRs.

The liberal-leaning ACLU thinks troubled mortgagors are getting the shaft from the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

While Ocwen Financial is laying off staffers, other firms are hiring, including Churchill Mortgage of Brentwood, TN.

With the increase, the average g-fee for new loans will be in the range of 60 basis points. But there is some good news: FHFA said it would eliminate the up-front “adverse market” fee of 25 bps assessed on all but the four states “whose foreclosure carrying costs are more than two standard deviations greater than the national average.”

Earlier this week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a final rule that allows the bureau to supervise for the first time the nonbank servicers of private and federal student loans that qualify as “larger participants” in the student-loan servicing market. With an emphasis on supervision, the rule is not expected to have much of an initial effect upon the secondary market for student loans. But the CFPB’s expanding role into the sector could change that, especially if there is a crisis in student-loan lending. The bureau’s new rule defines...

“Our estimate of legal and rep and warrant reserves for the largest banks is a total of roughly $60 billion,” S&P writes in a new report. “We estimate that the largest banks may need to pay out an additional $55 billion to $105 billion to settle mortgage-related issues, some of which is already accounted for in these reserves.”

Ed DeMarco might possibly name a chairman for the CSP platform and let Mel Watt have the final say on the CEO slot. Two mortgage executives interviewed for the CEO job include Peter Carroll and Luke Hayden.

Nonbanks are better than banks at controlling foreclosure timelines and servicing costs, according to industry analysts. Nonbank special servicers have significantly increased their servicing portfolios in the past year and expect to acquire even more servicing from banks in 2014. “The cost of servicing for banking institutions has increased in lockstep with the additional processes to maintain compliance with regulatory requirements,” according to Fitch Ratings. “In response, a number of large banks have employed ...