News

Rhode Island-based automated national title agency Linear Title and Closing has announced the formation of a title services division which will offer products and services to help title insurance agencies serve clients better and grow their businesses.

Mortgage Returns, a database management system and provider of automated marketing solutions for the mortgage industry based in St. Louis, Missouri, has announced a partnership with the Missouri chapter of the Make-a-Wish Foundation heading into the holiday season.

Michigan-based real estate finance and credit law firm Potestivo and Associates announced recently that Eric L. Miller has been hired as the firm's director of information technology.

Santa Ana, California-based Carrington Mortgage Services announced earlier this week its intention to expand into the Central Indiana city of Westfield. The expansion will create up to 360 high-wage jobs by 2019, the company announced. Carrington plans to invest $3.17 million to renovate a 77,000-square foot facility in Westfield and have it operational by the end of the year.

Lending was up all-around, ranging from year-over-year growth of 27.5 percent in smaller short-term loans in the year's first half to 9.9 percent in first mortgage loans in just the second quarter. The association also recorded improvements across other metrics, including credit union membership, which grew by more than 900,000 in the second quarter to surpass 98 million.

Not only is eRecording faster, NTC says, but it also provides a safer, more reliable way to process documents, minimizing risk of losing documents in transit and cutting down on the time and effort it takes to find public records. Though eRecording is catching on in most states, a few have been more receptive than most—including Colorado and Nevada, where 90 percent or more of NTC documents have been recorded electronically.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a cost estimate on Friday for S. 1217, a senate bill proposed June 2013 by Senator Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) that would eliminate GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and replace them with a private insurance company system with a government backstop. According to the newly-released estimate, removing the two GSEs would save the government billions of dollars in the next 10 years.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist and senior vice president of the National Association of Realtors (NAR), issued a statement on September 3 reporting that despite reports of more jobs, lower interest rates, and overall economic improvement, home sales are typically slow for the autumn months.

Three federal agencies – the Federal Reserve Board, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) finalized a rule with regards to the "liquidity coverage ratio" (LCR) of large financial institutions, the Federal Reserve announced on September 3.

While it's been a tame summer for mortgage rate movements, analysts at Bankrate say it's only a matter of time before that steadiness ends, especially as economic improvements spur policymakers at the Federal Reserve to stop holding interest rates down as much.