Fourteen months after the White House signaled its intention to make Carol Galante the nation’s next housing commissioner, the Senate on Sunday afternoon finally confirmed her nomination.

Industry veteran Jon Daurio, who’s trying to raise $250 million to start a new nonprime lender, is hoping to have much of the work tied to his capital raise completed by the end of the first quarter of 2013.

Sen. Bob Corker, R-TN, a key member of the Senate Banking Committee, has secured a commitment from Acting FHA Commissioner Carol Galante to toughen agency rules to put the insurance fund on a sounder financial footing.

Outside the weather’s frightful – and inside the loan closings are piling up like snow drifts in Northern Minnesota.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development late in the first quarter will auction off a package of up to 15,000 severely delinquent FHA-insured mortgages. A portion of the loans will be offered in Neighborhood Stabilization Outcome (NSO) pools in targeted areas.

Carrington Mortgage is contemplating the origination of non-agency mortgages to serve borrowers whose credit has been damaged during the Great Recession, company officials told Inside Mortgage Finance

Redwood Trust soon will issue a $397.8 million non-agency jumbo mortgage-backed security, according to a new presale report.

Bank and thrift holdings of first-lien mortgages increased in the third quarter of 2012 due to non-agency jumbo mortgages as well as uncommon retention of agency-eligible loans, according to .

Merrill Lynch is in the market actively buying jumbo mortgages and is also looking for an executive to manage its correspondent purchases, secondary market officials told Inside Mortgage Finance.

New Penn Financial, which is barely six years old, hopes to end 2012 with $5 billion in originations – almost double of what it funded a year ago.