Freddie Mac Deputy Chief Economist Len Kiefer, who will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Five Star Government Forum in Washington, D.C., on March 18, predicted in Freddie Mac's March 2015 Economic and Housing Market Outlook that the coming year would be the best for housing since 2007, immediately prior to the crash.

Congressman Tom Reed (R-New York) introduced the Mortgage Forgiveness Tax Relief Act of 2015 (H.R. 1002) on February 13, and that bill is now being heard in the House Committee on Ways and Means. Two weeks later, Senators Debbie Stabenow (D-Michigan) and Dean Heller (R-Nevada) introduced a similar bill (S. 608), which is currently in the Senate Banking Committee. Both bills would extend relief to homeowners on forgiven mortgage debt – the remaining mortgage balance when a borrower sells a home in a short sale to avoid foreclosure

Freddie Mac sued Deloitte for $1.3 billion in a Florida court in September 2014 with regards to fraudulent mortgage loans the GSE purchased from Taylor Bean & Whitaker, according to reports. Freddie Mac says it would not have purchased those mortgage loans from Taylor Bean if Deloitte, which audited Freddie Mac from 2002 to 2009, had paid attention to red flags which indicated fraud.

The foreclosure rate in judicial states was more than triple the rate in non-judicial states in January (2.4 percent compared to 0.7 percent, according to CoreLogic). New Jersey, a judicial foreclosure state, led the pack in foreclosure rate with 5.2 percent of all residential homes with a mortgage in some state of foreclosure during January. Second was New York, another judicial foreclosure state, with 4.0 percent.

Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller is trying to stop legislation that would eliminate a consumer protection known as the "settlement conference," which is a homeowner's final recourse before their home goes to foreclosure, according to an announcement on Zoeller's website.

Completed foreclosures have totaled approximately 5.5 million nationwide since the height of the financial crisis in September 2008 and have totaled approximately 7 million since homeownership peaked in the second quarter of 2004. January's foreclosure rate of 1.4 percent, meaning 1.4 percent of all residential homes with a mortgage nationwide are in some state of foreclosure, was the lowest level reported since March 2008. Year-over-year, the foreclosure rate was down 0.6 percentage points, from 2.0 percent reported in January 2014.

In the February 2015 Mortgage Industry Outlook Report released last month by the Collingwood Group and the Five Star Institute, 39 percent of survey respondents who service Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgages said that the biggest challenge in servicing those loans was fulfilling the Agency's property preservation requirements.

A bill approved by a committee in the North Carolina House of Representatives would allow distressed homeowners to omit forgiven principal mortgage loan debt when reporting tax income at the end of the year, according to a media reports.

The U.S. Department of Treasury recovered approximately $30 million for taxpayers through the sale of First BanCorp common stock, according to an announcement from Treasury on Monday.

Ocwen Financial Corp. found trouble in New York last year when a top regulator's investigation revealed that the servicer had sent erroneously dated correspondence to about 7,000 borrowers. Over the weekend, however, Ocwen made positive news in New York when it teamed with Neighborhood Housing Services of New York City to reach out to aid struggling homeowners who were at risk of foreclosure.