The federal statute that authorized the Department of Housing and Urban Development to establish the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage program addresses only HUD’s authority to insure reverse mortgages and not the lender’s contractual right to foreclose, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has ruled. Affirming the district court’s decision in The Estate of Caldwell Jones, Jr., Executrix Vanessa Jones and Leah Grace Jones, Minor v. Live Well Financial Inc., the circuit court determined that the HECM statute did not prevent foreclosure pursuant to a reverse-mortgage contract originated before Aug. 4, 2014, even if the non-borrowing spouse continued to live in the mortgaged property. The question before the court was whether the statute can be read broadly to prevent foreclosure after the borrower’s death and prevent the non-borrowing spouse from being ejected from the ...

Inadequate loan-servicing controls put the Department of Housing and Urban Development at risk of not being able to collect $6 million in partial claim notes, an inspector general audit revealed. The audit found that HUD’s National Servicing Center did not do a good job tracking partial claim notes for future collection. More specifically, NSC did not always enter partial claim notes and lender payments into its tracking system to ensure that note and mortgage documents supported the partial claim notes. The audit was triggered by an earlier IG pre-audit analysis, which found that partial claim notes may not have been properly uploaded in HUD’s Single-Family Mortgage Asset Recovery Technology (SMART) tracking system. HUD data showed there were 407,984 partial claims between Jan. 1, 2013, and Aug. 31, 2017. The department reviewed 695 non-sampled FHA loans with partial ...

FHA Issues Waiver of Property Inspections in Disaster-Stricken California Counties. FHA has issued a waiver of its timing policy for completing property inspections prior to closing or endorsing a loan for FHA insurance. The waiver is in effect in presidentially declared major disaster areas in Lake and Shasta Counties, CA, that were ravaged by wildfires and high winds. FHA believes that the wildfires and high winds have stabilized so as not to cause any further damage to properties, even though FEMA has not declared “all clear” in the affected areas. The waiver allows damage inspections to be completed after Oct. 2, for properties located in the PDMDA. NC Commissioner of Banks Amends State Reverse Mortgage Rules. The North Carolina Commissioner of Banks recently amended its ...

Lenders expressed support for the FHA’s new interim policy requiring a second appraisal for home-equity conversion mortgages when the initial property valuation may be inflated. The new appraisal policy for HECMs took effect on Oct. 1 and will be in place through Sept. 1, 2019. FHA will review the policy to determine whether to renew it beyond fiscal year 2019, said FHA Commissioner Brian Montgomery during a press briefing this week. FHA will perform a collateral risk assessment of ...

The major driver was a 16.8 percent jump in Fannie Mae issuance…

In 10 cases, the servicing process was delayed by more than two years...

Appraisal bias remains a primary concern…

If Ocwen reenters the servicing market as a buyer it will be doing so at a time when MSR prices are the highest they’ve been all decade...

But there’s a catch: the portfolio has a delinquency rate of 11.5 percent and foreclosures of 1.5 percent.

However, some large commercial banks are willing to remain in the market through correspondent arrangements…