NAR's oposition falls primarily in two areas: The PATH Act does not include an explicit federal guaranty and the bill dramatically restructures the FHA.

The hiring news isn't all bad in mortgage banking: Skyline Home Loans is looking for loan officers and Highlands recently hired some top executives.

On average FHA took 340 days to sell REO properties based on dispositions from January 2008 through June 2012, compared to just over 200 days for Fannie, Freddie and VA.

Loan applications are strong at Citadel, a newly launched nonprime lender. HUD goes on furlough for a day.

FHFA sued UBS in 2011 over $4.5 billion in RMBS securities that the bank sponsored and $1.8 billion in third party RMBS sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The higher MSR values are not surprising, but the level of these increases have some mortgage professionals scratching their heads.

While new regulations have been costly for servicers to implement, they have helped improve borrower satisfaction, according to J.D. Power’s latest primary servicer satisfaction study. “The fact that satisfaction continues to increase seems to indicate that changes being made in response to these new regulations are having a positive impact on the experience of customers,” said Craig Martin, director of investment services at J.D. Power. He cited regulations from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ...

Consumer complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau about their residential mortgages fell to 12,531 during the second quarter, down 9.2 percent from the first three months of the year, according to an analysis of the bureau’s complaint database by Inside the CFPB, an affiliated publication. That rate of decline is better than the overall 8.2 percent drop in complaints seen across all financial services product lines in aggregate, but not as good as the declines related to ...

A Manhattan federal judge earlier this month dismissed a class-action lawsuit against Standard & Poor’s Financial Services after finding no evidence that the rating agency defrauded investors when it gave a favorable rating to Fannie Mae stock prior to the financial crisis.The suit, filed in December 2012 on behalf of potentially hundreds of thousands of investors who bought stock in an offering by Fannie in May 2008, four months before the GSE was taken over by the government, alleged that S&P knowingly misrated Fannie’s stock. Valued at about $25 per share when it was issued, the stock dropped to about $3 per share after Fannie’s government conservatorship began in September 2008.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s official watchdog recommended in a report this week that the agency devise a way to measure how its guaranty fee hikes of the past two years have actually increased the participation of private investment in the mortgage-backed securities sector. As Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s conservator, the Finance Agency directed the GSEs to increase their guaranty fees as a means to encourage greater private-sector investment in mortgage credit risk, reduce their dominant position in housing finance and limit potential taxpayer losses, the FHFA Office of Inspector General report noted. “The enterprises’ average combined guaranty fees have nearly doubled since 2011 – due to legislation and FHFA’s initiative – and FHFA plans further gradual guaranty fee increases to spur private-sector mortgage investment,” said the OIG. “However, it is not yet clear how high FHFA must increase guaranty fees to achieve its objectives.”