The homeownership rates declined by at least 0.6 percentage points year-over-year in all age categories (under 35; 35 to 44; 45 to 54; 55 to 64; and 65 and older), with the largest decline coming in the 35 to 44 age group (2.3 percentage points, from 60.7 down to 58.4 percent.

Speaking from the Milken Institute Conference in Los Angeles, Blackstone Mortgage Trust CEO Steve Schwarzman told CNBC on Monday that the housing market has been "coming back for quite some time" even though inventory is low and prices have not increased as much.

Plain City, Ohio-based A2Z Field Services has announced the retirement of its president, Bill McMullen, and the promotion of longtime SVP Amie Sparks-Beebe to the position of president and CEO with the company.

Grassley was referring to the March 26 appointment of Edward Golding as principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Housing to essentially fill the duties performed by the office FHA commissioner, and the February 27 appointment of Lourdes Castro Ramirez to the position of principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Public and Indian Housing (PIH) at HUD.

Distressed home sales accounted for 13.5 percent of all home sales nationwide in February 2015, which represented a decline of 3 percentage points from February 2014, according to CoreLogic's February 2015 Distressed Sales data released Tuesday. February 2015's distressed sales ...

The portfolio's March expansion represented an increase of about $1.5 billion, up to $1.914 trillion. It was only the 14th time in the last 63 months that the portfolio has expanded dating back to January 2010, at the height of the foreclosure wave.

The thin shadow inventory compared with rising home values has caused the share of distressed home sales to drop to single digits. Since there will be fewer properties sold at deep discounts, this will cause home prices to strengthen, Yun said. "It also means that those practitioners who specialize in foreclosures or short-sales need to start thinking about a change in business models to normal home buyers and normal positive-equity home sellers," Yun wrote on the blog.

"The goal of conference is to connect the core community of researchers and policymakers with the best research being conducted across the wide range of disciplines and approaches that can inform the topic of consumer finance," CFPB said on the conference website. "We hope that the conference is attended by a diverse audience from academia, government agencies, nonprofit agencies, and industry."

Due to current low interest rates and anticipated appreciation rates for the next few years, homeownership is "one of the last legitimate wealth creation opportunities," according to Tim Rood, chairman of Washington, D.C.-based business advisory firm The Collingwood Group in an interview with Westwood One radio host Dirk Van last week.

Areas of the country that have been slow to recover from the recession will be the focus of HOPE NOW's outreach efforts to offer loss mitigation options to struggling homeowners in 2015, according to an announcement from HOPE NOW.