News

As the recovery quickens pace, home inspection franchise business has increased in Alabama. The WIN Home Inspection franchise has seen its revenue grow 35 percent in the past two years as the franchise grabs an outsized slice of the recovering real estate market.

In the Bay State, single-family home sales dropped 2 percent in November--the first time year-over-year sales dropped since April, according to the latest report by The Warren Group. For the first time since April, homes sales posted a decrease and the fewest number of sales recorded for a month.

Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $591 million to Fannie Mae to resolve repurchase claims on loans originated prior to 2009. The settlement will close the book on a number of problem legacy loans for both companies. For Wells Fargo, the agreement resolves substantially all repurchase liabilities related to the loans covered, and for Fannie Mae, it marks the conclusion of the GSE's legacy repurchase reviews.

Effective January 1, Ken P. Wilson, MAI, SRA, will take over as president of the Appraisal Institute, the group announced. Wilson, a valuation professional and consultant based in Plano, Texas, has been involved in the industry for 35 years.

Analysts at HomeVestors and Local Market Monitor say the formula for a nearly risk-free single-family investment opportunity is one part job growth and one part population growth, mixed with relatively low home prices. The fourth quarter report put out jointly by the two companies aggregates the 10 best and worst major markets for investing in single-family homes as rentals.

In 1998, the top 10 mortgage lenders held around 40 percent of the market. By 2010, their share increased to nearly 80 percent; since then, it's dropped down to around 60 percent. Why the decrease? Because only five of the top 20 single-family mortgage originators in 2006 remain active today. So what's driving the big guys out--market cycles or market restructuring? And will the current trend of favoring smaller lenders and servicers last forever?

Despite recent gains, which some of us believe are more of a mirage than an oasis, the economy still isn't creating enough good-paying full-time jobs to drive a full recovery in the housing market. At the same time, stricter lending requirements--and a lending environment likely to get more challenging before it gets easier--are the other major headwinds that could slow down housing.

Looking at ongoing trends, Zillow made four major predictions about the course of housing over 2014, and while the company expects conditions next year to be a bit friendlier to homebuyers, that doesn't mean we'll necessarily see more owner-occupied housing. Zillow also combined data on unemployment, population growth, and its own Home Value Forecast to glimpse into what it believes will be the hottest markets in 2014.

The veterans of this business can remember when REOs ran in the neighborhood of 150,000 a year, delinquency rates were just around 4 percent, and you only needed a credit score of 620 to qualify for a prime mortgage loan. But the housing finance industry, and default servicing especially, has changed. In the cover story of it's September issue, DS News looks at the many factors--from a slew of new regulatory mandates to an altered public perception of debt obligations--that have altered the business into something far from customary.

The fizzle of 2012's refinance boom and the publishing of new regulatory guidelines took their toll on origination numbers, but it was a decidedly different story for mortgage servicing rights (MSR) deals. DSNews.com takes a look back at some of the biggest wheelers and dealers in the MSR world over the past year, including Nationstar, Ocwen, Walter Investment Management Corp., and Two Harbors, among others.