News

LenderLive Network, an end-to-end mortgage services provider with headquarters in Denver, announced the hiring of Lorie Helms as chief information officer (CIO).

While the onslaught of new mortgage regulations in the last year has created headaches for lenders, it's had a clear positive impact in one area, Fitch Ratings says in a new report: the residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) sector. In its latest look at the RMBS segment, the company says that while the market still has some rebuilding left to do, it "has seen some rather substantial improvements of late," owing in large part to improved loan underwriting standards in recent years.

Speaking as a guest presenter at the Rotary Club of Atlanta on Monday, Fannie Mae President and CEO Timothy Mayopoulos warned against any type of reform where housing finance is concerned, telling the audience that “the (current) system works,” according to a report from the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

President Barack Obama is scheduled to speak about the U.S. housing market at Central High School in Phoenix, Arizona, according to multiple reports. Neither the president nor the White House has publicly announced exactly what he will speak about with regards to the housing market on Thursday.

It is not just the larger lenders that are under the microscope, however; a recent multi-million dollar settlement between a lender and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan showed that the smaller lenders cannot escape intense scrutiny from industry regulators.

A Kentucky man has pleaded guilty for his role in a massive tax scheme and for bribing executives at a Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) applicant bank, according to an announcement from Christy Romero, Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP).

The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on January 21 on whether or not "disparate impact" claims are allowed under the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The case scheduled to be heard later this month, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, et al., v. The Inclusive Community Project, Inc., centers on claims that the Texas state housing department's fixed criteria for approving tax credits for low-income housing developers resulted in the approval of such credits for a larger percentage of developers in areas more heavily populated by minorities than in areas more populated by whites.

The Financial Times Stock Exchange Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) Index reported a total return of 27.15 percent in 2014, outpacing that of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Standard & Poor 500, and NASDAQ, according to a report from Trepp. In an 11-month period from the end of 2013 to November 2014, the REIT market cap expanded from $670 billion to $890 billion.

Employment statistics released earlier in the week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) fall right in line with analysts' recent predictions that the housing market will make a comeback in 2015. According to the BLS November 2014 Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment report, unemployment rates declined year-over-year in 341 out of 372 metro areas in the U.S., while 12 areas reported jobless rates of at least 10 percent and 147 metros posted jobless rates of less than 5 percent.

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) may have to pay additional penalties to settle claims that it sold faulty U.S. mortgage-backed securities in the years leading up to the housing market crash, according to a report from Reuters.