Mortgage portfolio vendor Altisource has completed the spin-off of two of its units, including one that will focus on buying and owning single-family rental assets.

Happy New Year? It is if you’re a mortgage attorney charging billable hours to lenders that are trying to make sense of an array of pending rules coming out of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other agencies.

Walter Investment Management Corp. is expanding its presence in the reverse market with an agreement to acquire Security One Lending (S1L), a California-based retail and wholesale reverse mortgage lender, in a stock-purchase deal valued at up to $31 million.

Mortgage lenders saw a welcome decline in the volume of repurchases and indemnifications they had to make during the third quarter, but a new analysis of two major databases by Inside Mortgage Trends reveals that the industry made little progress in resolving the massive overhang of disputes involving loans from the depth of the housing crisis.

Merrill Lynch is in the market actively buying jumbo mortgages and is also looking for an executive to manage its correspondent purchases, secondary market officials told Inside Mortgage Finance.

New Penn Financial, which is barely six years old, hopes to end 2012 with $5 billion in originations – almost double of what it funded a year ago.

Carrington Holding Co., which has a growing presence in residential finance, has hired Wall Street veteran Christopher Whalen as Executive Vice President in charge of its investment banking operation.

The CFPB has proposed allowing banks, credit unions, and other financial services companies to test new consumer disclosures on a case-by-case basis.

Old Republic International Corp. intends to re-enter the mortgage insurance business with a revamped business risk model, fresh capital and a new subsidiary if it obtains approval from state regulators and its two major policyholders, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Chicago-based company, which also operates general and title insurance segments, still maintains a long-term strategic interest in mortgage insurance despite the negative trends in the sector, according to company executives during a recent conference call with analysts and investors. “But at this point, we have little, if any, idea as to the...

MetLife’s bank division has become the first major lender to say it plans to exit the mortgage business because of increased regulation. MetLife Bank announced it put its Home Loans unit up for sale earlier this month, a move that followed its decision to explore the sale of its depository business. “Today’s uncertain marketplace and regulatory environment require a tremendous amount of resources – both in terms of people and capital – to effectively compete in and profitably grow the forward mortgage business,” the company said. “Doing so would divert these resources away from MetLife’s primary focus on its global insurance and employee benefits businesses.”