News

California's attorney general says the $6.5 million settlement from two former Countrywide executives will be used to establish a fund to help foreclosed homeowners. The settlement comes from a litigation that began more than two years ago against Angelo Mozilo and David Sambol. According to the lawsuit, Countrywide lured buyers with low teaser rates and failed to inform them of the downsides of adjustable-rate loans. The suit alleged that Mozilo and Sambol knew of these practices and did nothing to stop them.

Bank of America has agreed to sell the lender-placed and voluntary property and casualty insurance assets and liabilities of Balboa Insurance Company to QBE Insurance Group of Australia. BofA inherited Balboa Insurance when it purchased Countrywide Financial Corp. Bank of America and its affiliates are expected to receive an upfront cash payment of approximately $700 million for the deal with QBE, as well as additional future payments.

Freddie Mac announced this week that its multifamily whole loan and bond guarantee business had approximately $15 billion in volume in 2010, down from $17 billion in 2009. The volume includes Freddie Mac's targeted affordable housing products. Last year Freddie Mac's multifamily business settled more than $13 billion through the GSE's conventional programs.

ICP Financial, a U.S. real estate investment firm headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, has signed an agreement with an unnamed top 5 European bank to buy distressed commercial real estate property and mortgage portfolios directly from American banks. The arrangement gives ICP a $4.8 billion purse to make individual purchases between $5 million and $180 million.

Vendor Resource Management (VRM), a Texas-headquartered asset management firm, will visit four cities in February and March to recruit minority brokers. These InMOTION recruitment events will take place in Cleveland, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Detroit. The company says through this initiative, it hopes to provide additional business opportunities for minority real estate offices, help stabilize property values in neighborhoods hardest hit by the economy, and deploy educational resources to the entire broker community.

The nation's unemployment rate dropped to 9.0 percent in January, although employers added just 36,000 jobs to their payrolls, according to figures just released by the Department of Labor. January's rate is down from 9.4 percent in December, and is the lowest jobless reading reported by the federal government in two years. The market was expecting the drop. The Dow Jones Industrial Average broke 12,000 on Thursday in anticipation of the decline.

Forget win-loss records, quarterback ratings, and total yardage tallies -- the winner of Sunday's Super Bowl XLV showdown can be predicted most accurately by analyzing the prevailing commercial real estate climate in the opposing teams' hometowns, according to Jones Lang LaSalle. Based on historical analysis of recent Super Bowls, the firm found that teams from cities with a higher percentage of vacant office space have won the Lombardi Trophy nearly two-thirds of the time.

In more bad news for the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), three congressmen, Reps. Jim Jordan, Patrick McHenry, and Darrell Issa have proposed a bill to end the program. Issa is chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and introduced the bill at the committee's first hearing last week. HAMP took a beating at the hearing from the lawmakers. They called the program a ""colossal failure"" and said it's just one more example of why government interference in the private sector doesn't work.

The U.S. Treasury Department says the government's bailout of the nation's banking system is ""nearing profitability."" Total repayments and other income from Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) initiatives that provided direct financial support to banks now comes to $243 billion, very near surpassing total disbursements under those programs of $245 billion. Treasury says the lifetime cost of TARP is primarily concentrated within funds disbursed for foreclosure prevention programs.

As the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act reached its half-year mark, an analysis of the landmark legislation by Ernst & Young reveals that early mobilization will become more critical as rule-making activity moves toward the one-year anniversary - when many final rules are put in place. The firm's study indicates that financial firms are at different stages in their responses to Dodd-Frank. Many of the largest are conducting impact assessments and creating roadmaps and governance structures to guide compliance efforts.