Residential servicers started 47,955 new foreclosures in the quarter, a 1.6 percent sequential decline, and a whopping 25.3 percent fall compared to a year ago.

“It was a record month for us,” said Angel Oak executive Mike Fierman.

The seller of the MSRs is a large nonbank based in the Midwest...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency late last month issued two final rules that will give the Federal Home Loan Banks somewhat more flexibility in setting collateral requirements for advances and managing their acquired member assets (AMA). A new AMA rule was necessary because the Dodd-Frank Act requires financial regulators to remove references to ratings, which had been used in setting limits on their AMA programs, most of which involve purchases of mortgages from member institutions. Under the new rule, the FHLBanks will be able to choose their own models to determine credit enhancement requirements. The FHFA also deferred...

Through the first nine months of 2016 the HECM volume leaders were American Advisors Group, One Reverse Mortgage and Reverse Mortgage Funding.

Citadel now has offices in California, Georgia, Oregon and plans to open an underwriting and transaction location in Salt Lake City soon.

A handful of industry groups representing banks and credit unions wrote to Senate leaders recently, making the case for switching the leadership structure of the CFPB from a single director to a multi-member commission, which was how the bureau was initially envisioned by early advocates such as Elizabeth Warren, then an adviser to President Obama. In a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, and Minority Leader-elect Chuck Schumer, D-NY, the Consumer Bankers Association, the Credit Union National Association, the Independent Community Bankers of America, and the National Association of Federal Credit Unions urged lawmakers to pass legislation to create a five-person, bipartisan board to govern the bureau. “The CFPB is an independent regulatory agency that provides the sole ...

Mortgage-related issues will be a big component of the CFPB’s fair lending priorities for 2017, the bureau indicated in an online blog post late last year. Among the issues for the mortgage industry are redlining and servicing. “While the bureau has taken important strides in our efforts to protect consumers from credit discrimination and broaden access to credit, we continue to identify new and emerging fair lending risks and we will monitor institutions for compliance,” said Patrice Ficklin, associate director of the CFPB’s Office of Fair Lending. Going forward, then, the bureau is increasing its focus in three key areas, the first of which is redlining. “We will continue to evaluate whether lenders have intentionally avoided lending in minority neighborhoods,” ...

The nation’s top three ARM producers are: JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Bank of America…

When the housing recession was in its early years, negative equity was most pronounced in a handful of Southwestern and Southeastern markets...