First Mortgage Corp., Ontario, CA, this month completed its liquidation, selling its branch network and $6 billion of servicing rights to other firms, and winding down a 44-year-old business that catered to FHA borrowers with lower credit scores. Jean Ziroli-Kobielsky, a recruiter for the family-owned business, noted that it wasn’t fear of regulatory oversight that prompted her father and brother to sell FMC, it was technology: “Some of our technology systems were still using DOS,” she told Inside Mortgage Finance. (DOS, or disk operating system, was the precursor to the Microsoft Windows software line for PCs.) She said...
The younger generation appears ready to take the plunge into the housing market, but finding an affordable home and gaining access to credit remain the top challenges, especially when it comes to African-Americans and Latinos, according to some experts. Mark Fleming, chief economist with First American, sponsor of a housing forum on Capitol Hill this week, said the way mortgage credit is formulated today doesn’t necessarily fit the type of ethnically diverse, millennial borrower of the future. “Ethnically diverse communities tend...