News

Last week the Treasury Department released a detailed report of Elizabeth Warren's schedule beginning October 20 when she became the White House advisor for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The calendar confirms a few things: first of all, Warren has been extremely busy.

The Government Accountability Office just completed a study of what is called ""bank walkaways"" - when a lender initiates foreclosure but then doesn't complete the process because the cost outweighs expected proceeds from the property's sale. Officials argue the practice intensifies market deterioration and complicates stabilization efforts. But the agency found that abandoned foreclosures are rare - representing less than 1 percent of vacant homes between January 2008 and March 2010 - but concentrated in specific areas of the country.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have instructed their selling agents to move forward with transactions involving foreclosed properties in cases where sales were suspended due to potential problems with the legal paperwork. The GSEs were forced to temporarily halt the sale of certain properties when news surfaced that some of the nation's largest servicers had been employing so-called robo-signers. Now that case reviews have uncovered no evidence of improper foreclosures, Fannie and Freddie are moving to proceed with REO sales.

Clayton Holdings now offers loan administration and asset management services to investors in small balance commercial real estate loans via its Quantum Servicing unit. Quantum's commercial servicing division will primarily handle non-performing commercial loans - including acquisition, development, and construction (ADC); multi-family; and shopping center assets - valued at $5 million or less. Clayton says the division is already servicing approximately 6,000 small balance loans.

Maine attorney general Janet T. Mills announced last week that negotiations with GMAC Mortgage LLC and Bank of America had resulted in a temporary halt in foreclosure sales in the state. The two lenders have agreed not to proceed to judgments on any pending matters in Maine until they have completed an internal review of their foreclosure procedures and discussed the procedures with the attorney general.

More than a half million people worked in mortgage lending as of October 2005 -- the highest month on record. Five years later, fewer than half are left. Headcount in real estate finance fell by another thousand during the third quarter of this year, according to industry data released Monday. During the July-September period, 3,216 layoffs were tracked while the number of new hirings fell to 2,286. North Carolina saw the largest net gain during the third quarter, with more than 500 mortgage sector jobs added there.

Michael Neumann, an independent real estate agent in the Chicago area, says he used to worry about the confidentiality of offers he would pass to prospective clients via email. But having recently employed the document management and signing process developed by DocuSign and secured with out-of-band authentication from Authentify, Neumann no longer worries about who might be picking up the proposals he sends electronically.

Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) has sent a letter to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) requesting Acting Director Edward DeMarco to provide full details of how taxpayer dollars are being spent to pay for lawyer's fees and legal costs for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Neugebauer says he's concerned that the taxpayers are picking up the tab for ongoing legal counsel for the very executives who drove the GSEs into conservatorship. The congressman wants a report from FHFA no later than December 31.

According to MDA DataQuick, which tracks real estate trends nationally via public property records, Phoenix-area home sales dropped to their lowest level for an October in 15 years. The decline is attributed to low new-home transactions, the slow economic recovery, and the market lull created by the homebuyer tax credits. A total of 6,903 new and resale houses and condos sold during October in the combined Maricopa-Pinal counties metropolitan area, down 6.2 percent from the month before and down 24.6 percent from a year earlier.

Freddie Mac reported Wednesday that mortgage rates remained stable this week, rising only slightly from the rates reported last week. A separate study from Bankrate reports rates dipped slightly this week. This week's Freddie survey shows 30-year-fixed-rate-mortgages averaging at 4.40 percent. Bankrate's study puts them at 4.58 percent.