Recent progress reports on the $25 billion national servicing settlement and the Home Affordable Modification Program suggest that servicers are complying with the vast majority of the programs’ requirements. However, regulators continue to push for better performance. The five banks participating in the national servicing settlement complied with the settlement’s 29 metrics as of the end of the second quarter of 2013, according to a report released last week by the settlement’s monitor. JPMorgan Chase was...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development this week issued a final rule implementing a qualified-mortgage standard for FHA loans that is essentially unchanged from the agency’s first proposal issued in late September. HUD determined that it had to tweak the calculation of points and fees that is in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s QM rule so that a large number – about 19 percent – of FHA forward mortgages will be classified as QMs. The final HUD rule establishes two categories of FHA qualified mortgages: safe-harbor QMs and rebuttable-presumption QMs. FHA forward mortgages will be considered...

A ton of new servicing deals have hit the market. But will regulatory scrutiny throw a monkey wrench into the transactions?

Investors hunger for yield. And what better place to get it than in the new breed of subprime mortgages.

Fitch says nonbank servicers resolve delinquencies at a significantly faster pace than banks, partly due to the loss-mitigation requirements for the five big banks included in the $25 billion national servicing settlement.

Treasury could withhold HAMP incentive payments to CitiMortgage, but noted that after considering all relevant factors, it has chosen not to at this time.

Although there are only a few weeks left in 2013, a few large mortgage servicing deals may get done yet.

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.”