City National Bank added two executives to its real estate team in the Bay Area. Industry veterans Charlie McGann and Deven Mays were both selected to serve as SVPs.

The Santa Fe Association of Realtors (SFAR) is pairing up with Lender Processing Services, Inc. (LPS) for the company’s Paragon MLS system. Paragon MLS will be used to serve more than 900 SFAR and member affiliates in the Sante Fe, Los Alamos and Rio Arriba counties in New Mexico.

Even though President Obama and Governor Romney were criticized for evading housing issues when running for president, Clear Capital asserts the ""sprint"" in housing still spoke positively for Obama and assisted him in his recent re-election. But, now that Obama has won a second term, his administration is charged with leading phase two of the housing recovery, and this will happen by collaborating with the industry to reduce regulatory uncertainty, according to a Clear Capital report.

In September, the nation's delinquency rate suddenly spiked 7.7 percent from August, according to data from Lender Processing Services (LPS). The data provider explained the surge in its recent Mortgage Monitor report for September. For one, first time delinquencies increased by about 200,000 from the month before as more borrowers rolled into 30 day delinquency status. Despite the increase, other numbers were still down. Foreclosure starts hit their lowest level since September 2007 and were down 27.9 percent yearly.

Hunt Leibert Jacobson, P.C. (Hunt Leibert) was honored as a recipient of USFN's 2012 Award of Excellence.

RES.NET announced its Short Sale portal has received an upgrade. Enhancements to the portal include improved tracking functionality and new tasks to help servicers adhere to regulatory and compliance standards.

Sabal Financial Group, L.P. hired Jason Hull as the director of business development to help the company continue seeing growth. Hull will be tasked with developing areas of Sabal's business, including commercial real estate investments and all types of third party services.

A lower supply of inventory and fewer distressed sales led to stronger home price gains across the country, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) revealed in a recent report. The median price for existing single-family homes increased 7.6 percent to $186,100 in the third quarter of this year compared to last year. NAR says the annual gain is the strongest since the first quarter of 2006 when the median price was up 9.4 percent. Total existing-home sales rose 3.2 percent quarter-over-quarter to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.68 million.

The positive outlook on home prices was further strengthened in Fannie Mae's most recent housing survey. In the October survey, respondents raised their expectation for home price growth in the next 12 months to 1.7 percent, up from 1.5 percent in September. In October 2011, consumers expected prices to fall by 0.3 percent. In addition, only 10 percent of respondents expect home prices to drop during the same one-year period.

In a slow recovery, Freddie Mac expects to see further growth in the multifamily sector, while the homeownership rate is projected to tick down from its already historically low rate. According to the GSE's multifamily demand forecast, the homeownership rate will descend by one or two percentage points to around the 65 percent level, which implies more than half of total new households will transition into rental units. On the other hand, the multifamily market is expected to reap somewhere around 1.7 million new renter households from 2011 to 2015. The projection is based on the assumption that the recovery is continuing at a slow pace.