Connecticut home sales at the start of the year rose 14 percent to 1,519, the highest level since January 2008 when there were 1,653 recorded sales. The gain also marks the 13th straight month of increases.

Freddie Mac increased its efforts to support greater transparency through the release of loan-level data for its single-family mortgages. The dataset includes about 15.7 million fully amortizing 30-year fixed-rate single-family mortgages originated between 1999 to 2011, which represents about 53 percent of the GSE's mortgage acquisitions for that period.

A new report from a government watchdog accused Freddie Mac, its servicers, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) of not meeting requirements when handling and resolving escalated consumer complaints. According to a report from the FHFA Office of Inspector General (OIG), Freddie Mac and eight of its largest servicers, which service 70 percent of the GSE’s mortgages, received over 34,000 complaints that became escalated cases during a 14-month time period ending November 30, 2012. After tracking the escalated cases, FHFA OIG found seven out of the eight Freddie Mac servicers did not resolve all escalated cases within the 30-day requirement.

Resolve Solution Services Corporation, a Dallas-based company specializing in borrower outreach and customer contact nationwide, announced its status as a Certified Minority Business Enterprise.

A new face has joined RealtyTrac's executive team as SVP of the RealtyTrac Network. Industry veteran Lisa Mackey was selected for the role and is charged with leading overall expansion of the recently launched licensed network for top brokerage companies.

Home values maintained their upward trajectory in February after climbing for the 16th straight month, according to Zillow's Home Value Index. The index registered a national value of $158,100 last month, which represents a slight 0.1 percent increase from January and a 5.8 percent jump from February 2012, Zillow reported. The yearly gain is the second largest increase since August 2006. In January, the year-over-year gain was 6 percent. At the same time, all 30 of the largest metros tracked by the online real estate marketplace saw monthly and yearly price growth.

Hope LoanPort (HLP) explained how its platform can help facilitate mortgage servicing transfers following an announcement from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) regarding plans to monitor transfer activity more closely. The HLP structure helps parties involved in the process by allowing existing cases to be transferred between registered mortgage servicers without having to deal with lost documents or the need to resubmit applications for mortgage relief.

The law firm of Hutchens, Senter, Kellam, & Pettit, P.A. hired one new associate and announced recognition for two of its attorneys. The Mortgage Bankers Association of Fayetteville, North Carolina honored the firm's real estate attorney Susan Benoit with the Past President's Award. In addition, attorney Maggie Bennington was appointed to the North Carolina Bar Association Worker's Compensation Section Council.

Home price gains may be outpacing increases in rent, but the cost of being a homeowner is still much less than that of a renter, according to Trulia’s Winter 2013 Rent vs. Buy report. After factoring all cost components, Trulia found buying a home is 44 percent cheaper than renting, down slightly from 46 percent a year ago. Yet, in the last year, asking home prices showed a 7 percent gain compared to a 3.2 percent increase in rents during the same time period, according to data from the real estate site.

The time properties stay in distress before going to sale has increased nearly five fold since 2003 in non-judicial states, according to CoreLogic's March MarketPulse report. The data provider tracked months in distress from 2003 to 2012 and found the disposition timeline in both judicial and non-judicial states has seen a significant extension. In judicial states, the disposition timelines remained relatively constant at seven months but began to rise in mid-2008 before increasing to an average of 35 months. In non-judicial states, it takes about 24 months before a distressed property goes to sale.