FHA lenders may start requesting case number cancellations on Jan. 15, but must submit all requests before midnight on Feb. 26.

“I only saw about 5 percent of my buyers face-to-face last year,” said one Texas-based loan officer.

S&P believes the gap in execution between whole-loan sales and securitization has started to narrow.

However, the VA loan program does not require a downpayment, which is a major attraction for some borrowers.

How much a loan officer earns can be determined by where his/her leads come from.

Since early September, at least 14 mortgage company acquisitions have been announced publicly, according to a database of deals compiled by Inside Mortgage Trends.

The proposed inter-agency rule covers only flood-insurance premium escrows and detached structures.

There was one piece of good news: Freddie Mac managed to boost its share of the GSE market up to 40.6 percent for all of 2014.

The average credit score on the 10th percentile of purchase mortgages increased from 555 in 2000 to 655 at the end of the third quarter of 2014.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision recently proposed replacing credit ratings with loan-characteristic metrics for determining capital requirements on bank holdings of residential MBS and commercial MBS. Federal regulators in the U.S. note that the proposal is preliminary and any changes to U.S. capital requirements will go through a notice and comment process separate from the BCBS’ activity. The current standardized approach established by Basel for determining capital requirement riskweights prescribes the use of external credit ratings for residential MBS and commercial MBS, among other holdings by banks subject to capital requirements. “While acknowledging that credit rating agencies play an important role in financial markets and that external credit assessments provide valuable information that may assist in the analysis of credit risk exposures, the hard-wiring of external credit assessments into standards, laws and regulations may often lead...