Mortgage Contracting Services (MCS) has named Greg Smith as assistant vice president of compliance in the company's Ruston, Louisiana, office, according to an announcement from MCS.

In the first bulk sale of seriously delinquent mortgage loans from its portfolio in 2015, Freddie Mac announced on Tuesday it has auctioned off 1,975 deeply delinquent non-performing loans with an aggregate unpaid balance of approximately $392 million.

Sales of distressed homes (REO and short sales) fell to their lowest level in seven years and foreclosure inventory dropped by 34 percent year-over-year in December 2014, according to CoreLogic's February 2015 The MarketPulse report released on Tuesday.

Ocwen Financial has signed a letter of intent to sell the mortgage servicing rights for $45 billion worth of Agency performing loans, according to an announcement on Ocwen's web site late Monday night. The portfolio consists of about 277,000 performing loans owned by Fannie Mae. The approximate unpaid balance of the loans is approximately $45 billion. According to the announcement, Ocwen expects the deal to close by the middle of the year.

Speaking at the National Council of State Housing Agencies Legislative Conference on Monday, the Department of U.S. Department of Treasury Counselor to the Secretary for Housing Finance Policy Dr. Michael Stegman said that the Obama Administration is "ready, willing, and able" to talk housing finance reform, which has been a hot-button topic in recent months as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain in conservatorship of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Investment firm Morgan Stanley is currently negotiating a possible settlement with the office of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman over the mishandling of subprime mortgage loans in the run-up to the housing market crash and financial crisis, according to multiple media reports.

The mortgage market could have taken twice the default risk during the first three quarters of 2014 and remained well within the high standards set from 2001 to 2003, according to data released by the Urban Institute on Monday.

In an ongoing effort to reduce the number of non-performing loans (NPLs) in the portfolios of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and transfer risk to the private sector, the GSEs' conservator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), on Monday announced enhanced requirements for the sales of NPLs by the GSEs. Freddie Mac has sold severely delinquent loans through two transactions in the past six months, one that totaled $596 million in unpaid balance (UPB) in August 2014 and one in February 2015 that covered $392 in UPB.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should take on more risk-sharing transactions, according to a vast majority of survey respondents in the March 2015 Mortgage Industry Outlook Report released Monday by The Collingwood Group and The Five Star Institute.

Fannie Mae's Book of Business decreased in January, but the GSE's gross mortgage portfolio experienced a rare expansion, according to Fannie Mae's January 2015 Monthly Volume Summary released Friday. After dropping by almost $11 billion from November to December and declining in 53 of the last 54 months, Fannie Mae's gross mortgage portfolio expanded in January at a compound annualized rate of 3.5 percent, from $413.3 billion up to $414.4 billion. It was the first time the portfolio expanded from month to month since December 2012 and only the second time since June 2010.