Current readings from the house price-to-rent ratio point to the potential for a bubble in the housing market, according to John Williams, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. “I am starting to see signs of imbalances emerge in the form of high asset prices, especially in real estate, and that trips the alert system,” Williams said in a speech this month. He noted that the house price-to-rent ratio is close to where it was in 2003, and home prices continue to increase ...
Servicers’ use of property-management contractors has helped save costs and increase efficiencies but also opened servicers to liability, according to an analysis of litigation involving contractors. Christopher Odinet, an assistant professor of law at the Southern University Law Center, noted that servicers’ reliance on property-management firms increased in recent years due to long timelines for delinquencies and foreclosures. Servicers hire the firms to inspect ...
With the CFPB’s legal action against PHH Corp. pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, a number of experts are revisiting the bureau’s enforcement actions related to marketing services agreements for clues as to how best to proceed going forward. What some of them are finding should give the industry pause. During a webinar this week, Jonathan Foxx, president and managing director at Lenders Compliance Group, a consulting firm ...
Repurchases and indemnifications by banks and thrifts fell to “just” $936.0 million in the third quarter of 2015, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of bank call-report data. That was the lowest quarterly buyback figure for the industry since the first quarter of 2008, when banks began disclosing this activity in their call reports. The third-quarter repurchase total was down 17.9 percent from the previous three-month period. On a ... [Includes one data chart]
An estimated 32.5 percent freefall in refi originations during 3Q had a much bigger impact on the conventional market than on government-insured lending.
Selling mortgage servicing rights into a declining interest rate environment can be tough sledding, but now that rates have headed north again, advisors that play in the space are anticipating strong sales through the fourth quarter and into the early months of 2016. “In the third quarter, we saw a number of large deals and even a handful of $500 million deals that just didn’t get done,” said Stephen Harris, managing director of MIAC Capital Markets. Harris also pointed out a ...
Although loanDepot’s multi-million dollar initial public offering is off the table for now, the privately held nonbank is expected to test the market some time again – it’s just a matter of when. The deal was scuttled late last week, after questions were raised about how the company was valuing itself in the IPO documents. Another sidebar was the revelation in the S-1 filing that Chief Financial Officer Jon Frojen had resigned just weeks before loanDepot’s stock was slated to trade. In the S-1, loanDepot tries to dispel the notion that Frojen’s resignation had anything to do with the IPO, saying the change was made by management prior to the
As the housing market witnessed its best year yet in terms of recovering from the financial crisis, reports are pointing to continued progress in 2016, albeit at a slower pace. Pent-up demand coupled with sustained job growth and rising home values encouraged homeowners to put their homes on the market, a trend that Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, said he expects to continue into 2016. “Sales activity in 2016 will once again be ...
The OCC’s language was not as strong as earlier reassurances from the CFPB that it would not be taking a “gotcha” or punitive approach when it commences with TRID examinations…
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