The FHA will allow lenders to suspend foreclosures on properties backed by Home Equity Conversion Mortgage loans for up to 60 days to help non-borrowing spouses of deceased HECM borrowers temporarily avoid eviction and, possibly, foreclosure. The announcement of the policy came as a federal district court judge for the District of Columbia considered whether to certify a class-action case filed by four surviving spouses of HECM borrowers last month. The lawsuit alleges that HUD had failed to protect them from being displaced from their homes – the same protection HECM regulations extend to reverse mortgage borrowers. The suit accuses the department of violating the federal Administrative Procedures Act by promulgating contradictory regulations without public comment. Last September, a DC judge found HUD in violation of federal law in a similar case and ordered that the case ...
UBS AG and Union Central Life Insurance Co. this week announced they have settled their legal dispute regarding the sale of residential MBS that UBS sold to the insurer in the years leading up to the financial crisis. The settlement reached in early March but jointly announced just this week, ends the legal action begun in a New York federal court in 2011. Union Central and affiliates Ameritas Life Insurance Corp. and Acacia Life Insurance Co. sued UBS and other financial service companies and executives in 2011, alleging that the defendants misrepresented the quality of the loans underlying the residential MBS that they sold to the insurers. In a 2012 amended complaint, Union Central alleged...
At one shop based in the Midwest there’s unconfirmed talk of loan officers who haven’t been paid for months, unpaid leases and top executives who were on vacation as volumes collapsed.
In a development with potentially negative implications for lenders, servicers and investors in student loan ABS, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a report this week critical of the “auto-default” practice seen in private student lending. According to the CFPB’s Mid-Year Update on Student Loan Complaints, borrowers say that some lenders demand immediate full repayment upon the death or bankruptcy of their loan co-signer, even in cases when the loan is current. Borrowers also said they confronted bureaucratic barriers to releasing co-signers from their loans, something that could help avoid auto-defaults. “Students often rely...
Ginnie Mae has asked Bank of America to provide missing documents on government insured loan pools after being informed by the MBS custodian that key paperwork is missing from the files. According to industry advisors familiar with the matter, the missing documents are tied to an $8 billion mortgage-servicing sale from BofA to PennyMac. So far, both parties have declined to discuss the matter publicly. One observer noted...
The best bet for lenders that want to reward and retain their top mortgage producers while remaining on the right side of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s loan-originator compensation restrictions is to keep any compensation plan simple and easy to follow, experts warned during an Inside Mortgage Finance webinar this week. Some four months after the LO compensation rule took effect, most in the industry are aware of the rule’s general prohibition – no compensation based on loan terms – but lenders remain full of questions in determining how they can and cannot compensate their loan officers and brokers, as well as whom exactly in their employ falls within the new CFPB rule, according to Richard Andreano, practice leader at Ballard Spahr’s mortgage banking group. Andreano noted...
The servicing rules implemented by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at the beginning of this year appear to have resulted in improvements to customer service along with increased costs for servicers, according to industry analysts. “Most servicers have adapted their operations to make the customer experience a key focus of their servicing operations,” according to analysts at Standard & Poor’s. When reviewing servicers, S&P said...
Industry representatives who, since the 1990s, have been imagining a world of electronic mortgage transactions and related documentation took renewed inspiration from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s announcement this week of a pilot project aimed at using the latest in technology to diminish the “pain points” of the closing process. Brian Webster, the originations program manager for mortgage markets at the CFPB, said last week that the bureau had identified 1,480 such sore spots. But during a public forum held this week, the CFPB focused on a handful of primary problems it said consumers have with the way mortgage closings are handled in the American market. First, they feel...
Two large acquisitions of mortgage servicing rights have been put on hold by regulators at the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Ginnie Mae, causing consternation in the secondary market. Moreover, according to trade group officials and advisors in the space, a deal needs to be struck between regulators and the industry that spells out the rules of the road when it comes to transferring MSRs from banks to their ultimate destination at nonbanks that are hungry for both product and market share. “We need an environment where servicing can be transferred...
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