News

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Office of the Inspector General (OIG) performed an audit on the financial conditions of mortgage insurers used for loans purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to assess their exposure to risk. The FHFA, as the regulator for Fannie and Freddie, provides oversight of the GSEs and contracted CohnReznick LLP to perform the audit.

While the homeownership rate among Americans age 65 and older has remained at a constant 80 percent for the past decade, the percent of older Americans with outstanding mortgage debt has increased since the start of the housing crisis, according to a report released Wednesday by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

Applied Business Software (ABS) recently released a new loan servicing software, The Loan Office, which is specifically designed for smaller lenders who need a powerful, yet affordable, solution for managing loans.

The share of all-cash sales reached a new high in the first quarter of 2014, even as the total share of institutional investor purchases dropped to near-record lows. All-cash sales made up 42.7 percent of all U.S. residential property sales for Q1, up from 37.8 percent from the previous quarter, according to RealtyTrac’s U.S. Institutional Investor and Cash Sales Report.

The mortgage delinquency rate declined to 3.61 percent at the end of the first quarter of 2014, according to TransUnion's latest mortgage report. Overall, the mortgage delinquency rate has dropped 24 percent in the last year, and has experienced nine consecutive quarters of decline.

Morningstar Credit Ratings today assigned its "MOR RV1" residential vendor ranking to Carrington Property Services (CPS) as a residential single-family rental property manager and as a residential REO asset manager. The forecast for the rankings is Stable.

Capstone Mortgage welcomed Vicky Elleray to the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company. Elleray will serve as the new operations/servicing manager for the company. She will oversee the day-to-day operations for servicing mortgage loans for Capstone.

With concerns about employment easing, Americans are increasingly optimistic about the housing market, reports Fannie Mae in its April National Housing Survey. And, according to the mortgage buyer, this climbing optimism may foreshadow an upswing in housing activity through the summer months.

Almost 150,000 homeowners in the United States were helped by the Homeowner Assistance team at Genworth Mortgage Insurance (MI), the Raleigh, North Carolina-based unit of Genworth Financial.

A top official for the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is looking at a felony charge for allegedly threatening the agency's former acting director, Edward DeMarco. Richard Hornsby, FHFA's COO, was charged in late April with "[threatening] to kidnap or injure a person," resulting in an order for him to stay away from DeMarco.