Daily Dose

For the government-sponsored enterprise guaranty rating, Fitch notes that the GSEs as a whole are the primary drivers of this rating’s unconditional guarantee of full and timely payment on the MBS that secures the bonds. Additionally, the performance of the underlying loans or MBS servicer is not factored into the rating on the bonds.

The latest NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index released in mid-May reports that about two-thirds of new and existing homes sold in the first quarter of 2015 were affordable to families that earned $65,800, which is the U.S. median yearly income, according to NAHB

Counsel's Corner is an ongoing series in which DS News talks with default servicing attorneys around the country about the most pressing issues facing the default servicing industry. This installment features Luke Sosnicki from Dykema's Los Angeles office, discussing RESPA’s new loss mitigation rules implemented by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in January 2014 and resulting litigation around those rules.

Banks and lenders that have suffered huge losses in some cases when HOAs have extinguished mortgages where the delinquent HOA dues amounted to a fraction of the balance on the mortgage claim that the super-priority lien law gives the HOAs too much power.

What the HVF authors discovered was that the two urban areas examined to determine what impact millennials were having, the Lyn-Lake area of Minneapolis and South Boston, have withstood the housing bust and were at all-time highs.

Delinquency rates improved overall in the first quarter of 2015, according to the New York Fed. At the end of Q1, about $679 billion of household debt was in some stage of delinquency (representing about 5.7 percent of outstanding debt), a decline from 6.0 percent reported at the end of the previous quarter.

Last year, in terms of dollar volume, non-banks accounted for over 40 percent of total originations, compared to 12 percent in 2010, the report says. Of the 40 largest servicers, 16 were non-banks, making up 20.5 percent of the market and 28 percent of outstanding top-40 servicing balances, compared to 8 percent in 2010.

Bank of America appealed the bankruptcy judge's ruling for the two cases, but the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the bankruptcy court's decision in May 2014, going against the Dewsnup ruling by saying that decision did not apply when the collateral on a junior lien (second mortgage) did not have sufficient enough value. The bank subsequently appealed the 11th Circuit Court's ruling.

Delinquencies were reported at less than 1 percent in 11 out of 15 single-family securitizations rated by Morningstar in March 2015, compared with 16 out of 17 in April. The recently-closed AH4R 2015-SFR1 (American Homes 4 Rent) and IH-2015 SFR2 (Invitation Homes) were added to the May 2015 report.

The homeowners claim that Ocwen charged them for unnecessary repeat inspections properties where the borrower was either delinquent or in default, and by doing so they claim Ocwen was in violation of Fannie Mae's servicing guidelines that require individual cases to be assessed to determine if the properties are in need of subsequent inspections after the first.