Government

Nearly 99,000 homeowners refinanced their mortgages in August through the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP), the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) said Tuesday. Since the beginning of this year, when a broader group of borrowers were made eligible for the program, the federal government's HARP initiative has put 618,217 homeowners with loans owned by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac into new mortgages with lower interest rates. According to FHFA, HARP is on target to reach a million borrowers in 2012.

Lender Processing Services’ (LPS) subsidiary, DocX, reached a settlement with Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, leading to the end of an investigation concerning DocX’s document execution practices, LPS announced in a statement Tuesday.

A Virginia man received a sentence of 14 years in federal prison for carrying out elaborate and sophisticated fraud schemes that took millions away from investors and the government, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) announced.

Five homeowners based in Alabama filed a class action suit against a group of 12 financial institutions, including Bank of America Corporation, Barclays Bank, and Citigroup, claiming the interest rates for their adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) were raised as result of the rigged London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR).

After jumping 11 points in three months, builder confidence inched up one point in October to 41, remaining at its highest level since June 2006, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) reported Tuesday, matching economist expectations. The October boost was due entirely to a surge in homebuyer traffic in October, as other elements of the index were flat from September.

Even though the number of foreclosure filings has risen dramatically in recent months in some parts of the country--specifically in judicial states--the ratings agency DBRS expects the total number of foreclosure filings to show evidence of a steady decline in 2013 when compared to 2012. This is due to ""the record number of servicers that are using short sales as their primary loss mitigation tool to prevent delinquent loans from entering foreclosure,"" the agency's analysts said in a research note issued Monday.

August data from HOPE NOW revealed mortgage servicers gave an estimated 75,968 homeowners permanent loan modifications during the month. In July, total loan modifications was higher at 82,679. HOPE NOW also reported the industry has seen 5.75 million loan modifications since 2007. Of those modifications, about 4.68 million were proprietary loan modifications, while more than 1 million were from HAMP.

The American Civil Liberties Union announced it has filed a suit against Morgan Stanley on the grounds of loan discrimination. The complaint filed by the ACLU, the National Consumer Law Center, and Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein alleges Morgan Stanley discriminated against black homeowners and violated civil rights laws by providing incentives to a subprime lender to originate mortgages that were likely to be foreclosed on.

A Manhattan real estate attorney was sentenced to 51 months in prison for his role in a $9 million mortgage fraud scheme, Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara announced Friday. U.S. District Judge Naomi R. Buchwald sentenced Eric Finger, 47, of Mineola, New York, in Manhattan federal court. Through Finger's scheme, he and his co-conspirators fraudulently obtained more than $9 million in mortgage loans to purchase dozens of residential properties throughout New York City and Long Island, with most of the loans going into default, according to a release.

The GSEs have increased their presence in the multifamily loan sector over the past several years, relying on these loans to meet affordable housing goals, according to a recent study by the Government Accountability Office (GOA). Prior to 2008, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together financed approximately 30 percent of the multifamily market. In 2009, the enterprises were backing 86 percent of multifamily loans.