Mortgage rates for the week ending March 18, 2010 showed very little movement from last week, Freddie Mac and Bankrate reported Thursday. According to Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey, rates for 30-year fixed mortgages averaged 4.96 percent with an average 0.7 point this week, nudging up from last week's average of 4.95 percent. Bankrate reported that rates for 30-year fixed mortgages averaged 5.07 percent, a slight drop from last week's average of 5.08 percent.

With the effective date of the administration's Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternative (HAFA) program just around the corner, lenders and servicers are preparing for an influx of short sale and deed-in-lieu requests. In an effort to provide industry professionals with the technology they will need to service the hundreds of thousands of loans estimated to be eligible for HAFA, Equator Financial Solutions, a Los Angeles-based software provider of default servicing solutions, is launching a HAFA software solution.

Santa Barbara, California-based Equi-Trax Asset Solutions, LP, a national collateral valuation provider offering a line of hybrid valuation products that bridges the gap between broker price opinions and full appraisals, recently promoted Danielle Drewisch to the position of director of client relations.

John L. Scott Real Estate, a real estate brokerage based in Seattle, recently partnered with the online real estate marketplace Zillow.com, enabling the company to feed all of its 15,000 for-sale listings to the Zillow Web site on a regular basis.

Following two consecutive weeks of growth, mortgage loan application volume fell 1.9 percent for the week ending March 12, 2010, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) reported Wednesday. The slump in mortgage application volume was surprisingly accompanied by a week-to-week drop in interest rates.

The allowance of broker price opinions in the administration's Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives (HAFA) program has created a major controversy. As DSNews.com previously reported, four appraisal organizations recently wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, voicing concerns over the use of BPOs for short sales under HAFA. In response to this opposition, Vicki Cox Golder, president of the National Association of Realtors (NAR), wrote her own letter, supporting HAFA and its allowance of BPOs.

HOPE NOW says its members completed 99,499 proprietary loan modifications in January, almost double that of the 50,364 permanent mods finalized under the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) industry-wide during the same month. Although HOPE NOW is seeing substantial success with non-HAMP modifications, the organization is also taking a lead in helping servicers collect borrowers' documents at its localized outreach events, in order to speed the process of converting trial HAMP mods to permanent status.

RebuildUS, LLC, an online foreclosure marketplace based in Woodland Hills, California, announced Friday that it has appointed Chet Pipkin to the company's board of advisors. Pipkin is the founder and chairman of the board of Belkin International, Inc. Since 1983, he has guided the company to becoming a dominant global consumer electronics brand, generating annual sales in excess of $1 billion.

The Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae) guaranteed more than $29.3 billion in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in February, the association announced Monday. Total single-family issuance for February was more than $28 billion, Ginnie Mae's multifamily MBS issuance was more than $730 million.

With the expiration of several key government support programs looming, loss severities on distressed U.S. residential mortgage loans are likely to escalate, Fitch Ratings recently reported. The expiration in the coming months of both the homebuyer tax credit and the Federal Reserve's $1.25 trillion mortgage-backed securities (MBS) purchase program will increase negative pressure on home prices and loss severities.