HUD and FHA offices will be closed on Friday. Foreclosure activity was up and down in May. And the "nerdy" reference behind Fenway Summer.

Mortgage lenders are increasingly anxious that they may be blindsided by fair lending claims based on the disparate impact theory as they try to keep their business within the safe harbor for qualified mortgages under the new ability-to-repay rule. “My concern is about who’s going to do a QM and who’s going to do [non-QM] ability-to-repay, and how can we somehow get a disparate impact out of this?” said Charles Lewis, vice president of compliance services at the Missouri Bankers Association. Speaking at the American Bankers Association’s regulatory compliance conference in Chicago early this week, Lewis urged...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced the first-ever settlement regarding the treatment of real estate-owned properties in minority neighborhoods. Under an agreement with HUD, the National Fair Housing Alliance and several other fair housing organizations, Wells Fargo will invest a total of $39 million in 45 communities to support neighborhood stabilization and property rehabilitation in minority neighborhoods. The settlement stemmed...

FHA officials had sought the legislation so they can act quickly to address problems involving the troubled HECM program.

The Inspector General of HUD plans to expand audits of FHA servicers later this year.

Roughly $148 billion of single-family agency MBS were issued last month, down almost 3 percent from April’s level. May was the slowest month for agency MBS issuance so far in 2013.

Testifying before a Senate panel earlier this year, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan warned that sequestration would limit the FHA’s ability to provide information and services in a wide range of areas.

In a new filing with the SEC, Walter Investment said it discovered that its new reverse subsidiary had failed to record certain servicing errors.

The FHA, in a new crackdown on lenders with underwriting and delinquency problems, has sent “notification” letters to at least a dozen firms, Inside Mortgage Finance has learned. Advisors note that as many as 15 mortgage companies may have received warnings from the agency. According to the Collingwood Group, a Washington-based advisory firm, lenders were told they could soon lose their status as direct endorsement lenders, which means they have to get FHA insurance approvals through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “If you can’t engage...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development will face intense scrutiny from lawmakers after revelations this week that the department may have suppressed information indicating much higher projected losses for the FHA Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund than it reported to Congress. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-CA, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, raised the issue in a May 29 letter to FHA Commissioner Carol Galante, citing suspicious email exchanges between certain top FHA officials and Tyler Yang, chairman and chief executive officer of Integrated Financial Engineering, which performed the FY 2012 actuarial audit of the fund. The letter is...