NextAce Corp., Orange, California, unveiled SearchQ, a solution that provides immediate retrieval of property ownership from the company's Web site. SearxhQ provides users with details on property ownership on the latest deed and all ownership changes for up to 10 years; outstanding debt, including mortgages, assignments, foreclosure activity, and voluntary and involuntary liens; taxes, including current year taxes and payment information in many counties; current vesting information and an abbreviated legal description for the property.

Fannie Mae last week opened a mortgage help center in Sacramento, California, to provide free education and counseling services to struggling local homeowners with Fannie Mae-owned mortgages. The facility is Fannie Mae's 10th mortgage help center across the country. The GSE developed the center in partnership with NeighborWorks HomeOwnership Center Sacramento Region, which staffs the office, as well as with local community and elected officials and area mortgage servicers.

The Senate Banking Committee held a hearing Tuesday on housing finance reform, the first of three housing-related hearings on the agenda this week. The issue of government guarantees for home mortgages came under some fire. One witness with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. noted that without any change in policies and without any further increase in the GSEs' debt, the national debt will reach $30 trillion in 10 years.

American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc. (AHMSI), based in Coppell, Texas, has deployed a new system to keep call center agents up-to-date on regulatory changes. AHMSI had relied on a learning management system to train its agents but had difficulty finding the time to use the technology without taking the agents away from their duties, hurting service levels, according to Atlanta, Georgia-based Knowlagent, which supplied its RightTime technology to AHMSI.

Mortgage fraud grew in the second quarter of the year but was down from where it was a year earlier, according to the Second Quarter 2011 Mortgage Fraud Index, released Monday by MortgageDaily.com. The index, based on criminal and civil cases in which defendants allegedly attempted to deceive real estate lenders into making credit decisions based on fraudulent documentation or false appraisal values, increased to 1261 based on 194 cases during the quarter, up 27 percent from the previous period, but down from 1699 for the same period last year.

Though the average time for a short sale has dropped from 256 days in the first quarter of the year to 245 days in the second quarter of 2011, the process could be made shorter with better training, said Chris Plummer, managing director of Dallas-based Wingspan Real Estate Network (WREN), an affiliate of special servicer Wingspan Portfolio Advisors, based in Carrollton, Texas. WREN is partnering with the Five Star Institute, a Dallas-based mortgage industry group, to encourage the widespread participation by real estate agents in the Five Star Short Sale Certification Training Program, which features Fannie Mae Short Sale Assistance Desk (SSAD) training.

Commercial and multifamily mortgage delinquency rates among four out of five major investor groups decreased in the second quarter of 2011, with only the 30-day delinquency rate for loans held in commercial mortgage-backed securities increasing, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The rate for loans held by FDIC-insured banks and thrifts that were at least 90 days delinquent decreased 0.25 percent between the first and second quarters, while delinquencies for life company portfolios and the GSEs both declined, but by smaller ratios.

In addition to refinancing assistance for mortgage holders, President Barack Obama's proposed American Jobs Act includes a handful of elements that relate to the distressed real estate market, all part of what the administration has labeled Project Rebuild. The new $15 billion program is based on the Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) and will attempt to connect Americans looking for work in distressed communities with jobs needed to repair and repurpose residential and commercial properties.