News

Residential mortgage servicing rights sales and valuation advisory services provider MountainView Servicing Group announced Thursday that it is acting as adviser for the sale of a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac portfolio with an unpaid principal balance (UPB) of about $3 billion.

While most Republican lawmakers grilled HUD Secretary Julián Castro on the recent lowering of the FHA mortgage insurance premiums and FHA's MMI Fund Wednesday during his testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, Representative Mia Love (R-Utah) opted to cover a different subject: defaults and their potentially negative effect on their respective neighborhoods.

A nationwide survey conducted by Auction.com, a leading online real estate marketplace, showed a continuation in January of a trend seen in the fourth quarter of 2014 – that of investors' preference to flip houses rather than rent them out. Even as the demand for rental housing has increased in most markets, investors continue to prefer to flip houses due to a recent combination of price appreciation and decreased inventory. About 50.2 percent of investors surveyed in January said they preferred to flip the homes they purchased,

HomeUnion, an Irvine, California-based online real estate investment firm, has announced the hiring of property investment management expert Julie Manthey as senior director of asset management.

Rosenberg & Associates LLC, a real estate law firm based in the Washington, D.C., area, has announced the promotion of Senior Associate Mark Meyer to Partner within the firm.

REO sales posted the largest residential cash home sales share in November 2014 with more than 60 percent, according to CoreLogic's new cash sales data released on Wednesday.

In a speech at the Economic Club of New York in New York City on Wednesday, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher's reflections on his decade with the Fed included his insistence that monetary policy should not be politicized.

In its complaint, the firm alleges that HLSS, which deals in the acquisition of mortgage servicing assets, made misleading statements and failed to disclose to investors how much its own business depended on Ocwen's and the extent of Ocwen's troubles.

Attorneys for investment firm Morgan Stanley made a motion in the New York Supreme Court Tuesday to dismiss two lawsuits filed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) accusing the firm of failing to buy back $2.5 billion worth of faulty residential mortgage-backed securities, according to media reports. FHFA, which is suing on behalf of the RMBS pools' trustees, claims that Morgan Stanley committed a breach of contract by failing to buy back the poor performing loans, which were pooled into securities and sold to Freddie Mac in 2007.

In his first time to testify before Congress since being named HUD Secretary last July, Julián Castro on Wednesday defended the decision to lower FHA mortgage insurance premiums and predicted that the agency's Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund would exceed the required 2 percent ratio within two years.