Government

The U.S. Department of Labor released new numbers Friday, and although the unemployment rate held steady at 9.7 percent, the still-elevated number of jobless Americans continues to be one of the biggest obstacles to recovery in both the residential and commercial real estate markets. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said in an interview ahead of the labor report, ""The unemployment rate is still terribly high, and it's going to stay unacceptably high for a long period of time.""

In new policy guidelines released this week, Fannie Mae told servicers that they can no longer name MERS as the plaintiff in any foreclosure action, whether judicial or non-judicial, on a mortgage loan owned or securitized by the GSE. MERS is widely used by the industry to keep track of the servicing rights on home loans, and is often listed as the ""mortgagee of record."" But the system has become the centerpiece of a number of lawsuits, with foreclosed homeowners challenging the naming of the electronic system as mortgagee.

At a briefing of state housing counselors held this week at the HomeFree-USA office in Prince George's County, Maryland, Congressman Steny Hoyer and Raymond Skinner, Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development secretary, both expressed their support for HOPE LoanPort, making Maryland the first state in the nation to publicly endorse the program.

The FDIC announced Thursday that Charlotte, North Carolina's Roundpoint Mortgage Servicing Corporation placed the winning bid for an equity interest in a portfolio of 3,373 residential mortgage loans. Collectively, the loans have an unpaid principal balance of $490.7 million. They were seized by the federal agency from 19 failed banks between August 2008 and March 2009, and half are delinquent.

The Association of Mortgage Investors recently released a detailed set of guiding principles to Congress and regulators for how to overhaul the beleaguered securitization market in a manner that will ensure private sector demand for mortgages in the future, which the association says is crucial to the recovery of the global economy.

Vermont Attorney General William H. Sorrell announced Wednesday that Countrywide Financial Corporation, now a part of Bank of America, has entered into a settlement with his office to resolve claims concerning Countrywide's origination of home loans in past years. The agreement calls for Countrywide to pay $100,000, which will be disbursed to borrowers in the state whose Countrywide loans were foreclosed upon and used for general foreclosure prevention efforts.

Freddie Mac is riding the wave of the homebuyer tax credit, hoping it will be incentive enough to entice deal-seekers to snatch up foreclosed properties it has repossessed in the hard-hit Las Vegas and Southern California markets and put a dent in the GSE's swollen inventory of REO properties. Freddie officials announced Thursday that they plan to auction off hundreds of HomeSteps REO properties to individual homebuyers in these areas during the last week of April - just ahead of the contract deadline for the federal tax credit.

New data from HOPE NOW shows that servicers completed more than 95,000 loan modifications through their own proprietary programs in February. That's almost double the 52,000 modifications finalized under the government's Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) during the same month. The report also showed declines in the number of 60-day delinquencies and foreclosure starts and sales.

The government recently ramped up its efforts to help at-risk borrowers, but according to a recent opinion poll by Destin, Florida-based Housing Predictor, that's not what the majority of people want. Despite the impact it would have on the U.S. economy, 78 percent of those polled said they want the government to let home foreclosures run their course instead of making efforts to stop the crisis.

The Federal Reserve's role as buttress and benefactor of the nation's mortgage debt market came to an end Wednesday. Since November 2008, the central bank has been the market's No. 1 patron, buying up $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities. Fears have surfaced that the Fed's exit could leave a gaping hole in the secondary market, causing interest rates for home loans to spike and buyer demand to dwindle. But analysts say private investors will pick up the slack and rates will rise less than a quarter of a percentage point over the next quarter.