The slow foreclosure timelines in states with a judicial foreclosure process appear to have a silver lining: home-price bubbles are more prevalent in other states, according to Fitch Ratings. In a report released this week, analysts at the rating service said home prices nationally appear to be on solid footing, although some regional pockets of price risk are growing, primarily in states in the West and Southwest. Fitch said...
The housing market has been fairly stable in 2016, but industry insiders say decreased affordability and credit access could impede the multiyear housing recovery. With interest rates lower than expected, the Mortgage Bankers Association raised its 2016 origination forecast to $1.60 trillion in May from its January projection of $1.38 trillion. It expects purchase originations to increase in 2017 and 2018, thanks to economic growth and a strong job market. But many first-time homebuyers may be...
Earlier this month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau asked to intervene in a federal whistleblower case brought against Ocwen Loan Servicing in order to protect the confidentiality of its supervisory information. “The bureau seeks to intervene for the limited purpose of invoking the bank examination privilege and the bureau’s regulations to protect confidential and privileged bureau supervisory records and information related to the bureau’s supervision of Ocwen,” the CFPB said in its motion filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Sherman Division. Counsel for the relators in the case, Michael Fisher and Brian Bullock, and the defendants, Ocwen Loan Servicing and Ocwen Financial Corp., told...
Originations of interest-only mortgages increased sharply in the first quarter of 2016, according to a new analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. A group of 12 lenders originated $8.72 billion in IOs in the first quarter, up 26.9 percent from the previous quarter and a 29.8 percent increase from same period in 2015. IO originations in the first three months of 2016 even topped the $8.61 billion in IO originations by the lenders in the second quarter of 2015. [Includes one data chart] ...
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this week issued an interim final rule showing an 8.5 percent increase in the maximum civil penalties it can obtain for various consumer protection violations…
The outstanding supply of single-family MBS in the market fell slightly in the first quarter, but you have to go two paces to the right of the decimal point to see it. A new Inside MBS & ABS analysis indicates that outstanding MBS totaled $6.407 trillion as of the end of March. That was down 0.01 percent from the previous quarter, stalling a steady expansion of the market that took place in 2015. And with a modest 0.2 percent increase in total single-family mortgage debt outstanding, the modest contraction in MBS nudged...[Includes two data tables]