News

A nationwide recruiting agency announced its search for mortgage professionals in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in response to growing needs for mortgage industry professionals. Due to record-low interest rates, demand for services related to the mortgage industry has grown as homeowners look to refinance and potential homebuyers look to lock in mortgages at low rates.

California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris outlined the six parts in the proposed California Homeowner Bill of Rights during a press conference on Wednesday. The first part of the bill the California AG announced was the Foreclosure Reduction Act, which will address dual tracking issues. Other requirements in the bill include a $25 levy each time servicers record a notice of default, fines against owners of blighted property from $1,000 to $5,000 per day, and a $10,000 civil penalty for ""robosigned"" documents.

Overall economic activity continued to increase at a modest to moderate pace in January and early February, the Federal Reserve said in its periodic Beige Book, an anecdotal report of conditions in each of the 12 Federal Reserve districts. The report showed economic improvement varying across the country -- economic activity rose at a somewhat faster pace in the Philadelphia and Atlanta districts but growth was slower in New York. Minneapolis characterized the pace of growth as firm.

Real gross domestic product - the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States - increased at an annual rate of 3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Wednesday. In its initial report on fourth quarter GDP, the BEA had said the nation's economy grew at a 2.8 percent pace. Economists had forecast no change in the ""advance"" GDP estimate issued last month.

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has seen its capital reserves quickly dissipate over the past few years amid a growing number of mortgage defaults and payouts on insurance claims. In an effort to bolster its capital cushion, the federal agency has announced a new premium structure for FHA-insured single-family mortgage loans. FHA will increase its annual mortgage insurance premium by 0.10 percent for loans under $625,500 and by 0.35 percent for loans above that amount. Upfront premiums will also increase by 0.75 percent.

While the Case-Shiller indexes reported new lows for house prices for the end of 2011, responses from analysts are mixed when determining what the data means for home values in the long run. Experts representing Capital Economics, IHS Global Insight, and Standard and Poor’s assessed the implications of the data for the future. While Capital Economics believes the decline may come to an end after a few more months, others are expecting this trend to continue into 2012.

During a Senate subcommittee hearing, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan was prodded with questions on investigation results regarding how many and what percentage of people actually suffered from wrongful foreclosures. As far as actual numbers, Donovan said there very few folks who actually lost their homes, but emphasized that what the organization did find were very significant and very pervasive errors that have real impacts on families.

While the REO Rental Initiative was first supported by Capital Economics when first proposed last year, a report released by the analytics company stated that the news was disappointing upon the discovery that 85 percent of the REO properties to be sold were already occupied by tenants.

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley signed a bill to ban Wall Street Resale Fees, which require a percentage of the sale of a home to go to a third party. Carolina is the 38th state to sign the bill banning these fees, also known as Private Transfer Fees. The fees are added to home sale contracts by private third parties and typically require that over the next 99 years, a percentage, usually 1 percent of the sale of a home, be paid to the third party.

All three headline composites of the S&P/Case Shiller Index ended 2011 at new lows. The national composite fell by 3.8 percent during the fourth quarter of 2011 and was down 4.0 percent versus the fourth quarter of 2010. Both the 10- and 20-city composites fell by 1.1 percent in December over November, and posted annual returns of -3.9 percent and -4.0 percent versus December 2010, respectively. With these latest data, all three composites are at their lowest levels since the housing crisis began in mid-2006.