Government

First Preston Management, a national real estate marketing and management firm, has been selected by HUD to provide property management services for HUD's single-family asset portfolio in 11 states, including Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Since the government's Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives (HAFA) program was implemented just over two months ago, Loan Resolution Corporation, a pre-foreclosure asset management firm based out of Scottsdale, Arizona, says it has been assigned more than 10,000 HAFA requests. Loan Resolution executives attribute the growth to the company's ""quality over quantity"" approach when it comes to helping homeowners avoid foreclosure.

A judge in St. George, Utah has issued a preliminary injunction stopping all foreclosure sales in the state by Bank of America and its subsidiary ReconTrust. The decision, by 5th District Court Judge James L. Shumate, was based on the grounds that the nation's largest mortgage servicer and its related companies are not registered to do business in Utah. The court order puts a temporary freeze on all trustee sales of homes foreclosed by BofA, and if made permanent, it could affect thousands of Utah borrowers facing foreclosure.

Equator has initiated 200,000 short sale transactions through its technology platform since the system was first launched just seven months ago. Another 15,000 short sales have been initiated on the Equator platform that conform to the guidelines of the federal government's Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives (HAFA) program.

Investment sage Warren Buffet told the federal commission investigating the causes of the financial crisis that finger-pointing at the big three credit ratings agencies should be directed elsewhere. The ratings industry has come under heavy fire from lawmakers and regulators for assigning top credit grades to mortgage-backed bonds that later turned out to be lemons. But in his testimony, Warren said he's ""much more inclined"" to come down hardest on the banks' CEOs. He says the ratings agencies made the same mistake that 300 million other Americans made.

Last week marked the launch of a new national organization devoted exclusively to residential mortgage compliance - the Association of Residential Mortgage Compliance Professionals (ARMCP). Membership in the non-profit group is free at this time. The association stipulates that members must be industry participants who have an actual practice or institutional responsibilities involving residential mortgage compliance.

Banks in Illinois, Mississippi, and Nebraska were closed by their regulators over the weekend, bringing the number of failed FDIC-insured institutions to 81 for the year. The FDIC was unable to find a buyer for the Illinois bank that went under. Illinois has now had 12 bank closings this year, trailing only Florida with 13.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has issued new guidelines for modifying VA-guaranteed home loans. The new procedures are effective immediately, and give servicers the authority to restructure distressed loans in accordance with the administration's Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) if other loss mitigation options have been exhausted. VA says it expects servicers to exert all reasonable efforts to assist veteran borrowers in retaining ownership of their homes or mitigating losses by pursuing alternatives to foreclosure.

The California Senate has approved a new foreclosure bill and sent it to the Assembly for review. It lays out two major provisions intended to deter lax behavior on the part of servicers and prevent avoidable foreclosures in the state. The legislation would provide a means of recourse to homeowners whose homes were lost to foreclosure due to serious servicer errors, and it would prohibit servicers from starting the foreclosure process until a homeowner has received a final decision on their modification.

The nation's unemployment rate dropped from 9.9 percent to 9.7 percent in May, as the economy added 431,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday. The job market growth, though, is being called ""disappointing"" since nearly all of the new positions were temporary workers hired by the U.S. Census. The private sector counted only 41,000 new jobs in May. The previous month, newly released job data shows that residential mortgage companies cut 5,500 full-time workers from their payrolls.