News

Lenders One Mortgage Cooperative recently announced its partnership with AllRegs as the organization's newest preferred vendor. Lenders One is a national alliance of more than 150 independent mortgage bankers, correspondent lenders, and suppliers of mortgage products and services. The company says its newest arrangement with AllRegs will provide these members with compliance training programs and access to a central repository for single and multifamily underwriting and insuring guidelines.

Now that the federal government's homebuyer tax credit stimulus is in the rear view mirror, residential home sales are in a period of correction, according to RE/MAX. The real estate conglomerate's July housing report tracks market conditions in 54 major metropolitan areas across the country. It revealed that closed transactions in July were 27.8 percent lower, while prices were 1.3 percent higher than during July 2009. Home prices in California marked the highest year-to-year gains in the survey, accompanied by Honolulu and Boston.

First-time homebuyers continued to desert the housing market in July, according to a new industry study released Monday. Campbell Surveys says first-time homebuyers accounted for only 39 percent of the home purchase market last month. That's down from a peak of 48 percent as recently as March. The research firm, though, reported that short sales remain one of the few bright spots in the housing market. Time-on-market for short sales continued to decline, from an average of 20.5 weeks in February to 15.8 weeks in July.

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives are calling on President Obama and the GSEs' regulator to ""use all of [their] powers to recover money"" from companies that shifted losses on to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They say legal action should be used to recoup funds from the underwriters of faulty mortgages and the issuers of underwater securities that have saddled Fannie and Freddie with hundreds of billions of dollars in bad loans and cost taxpayers almost $150 billion to date.

Asset management software developer RES.NET announced Thursday that it has completed a data integration agreement with the online real estate auction firm Bid4Assets.com. The partnership allows RES.NET's clients to directly feed real estate property listings to Bid4Assets.com for additional exposure to the auction site's over 500,000 buyers in liquidating foreclosed properties.

Lender Processing Services, Inc. (LPS) said Thursday that it is forming a strategic partnership group to establish a network of default-related service providers. The company says the goal of the network is to lower the cost of default services and create efficiencies for borrowers, mortgage servicers, and investors. Members will include attorneys, title companies, foreclosure trustees, publication and posting providers, and service of process companies.

The administration released new numbers Friday on the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). Housing analysts and market observers say the results are disappointing at best. The latest report shows that nearly half of the homeowners approved for trial modifications have fallen out of the program. And during July, servicers converted just 36,695 HAMP trials to permanent status, a significant slow-down considering growth in permanent mods averaged more than 50,000 a month throughout the first half of this year.

Financial Asset Services, Inc. (FAS) has launched a new door knock service to help mortgage servicers with loss mitigation. The company says successful door knocks can lead to discussions of short sale transactions or deed-in-lieu negotiations for the servicer and allow homeowners to leave the property on their own terms.

One in four real estate professionals polled by Clear Capital said the BP oil spill has brought home sales to a halt and is pushing already depressed property values lower along the Gulf Coast, with the impact even spreading beyond the coastal region to nearby areas that have seen no physical damage from the environmental catastrophe. Areas of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle are reporting an estimated 5-15 percent decline in home values and a drop in sales volume in June ranging from 25 percent to 33 percent.

In its efforts to protect homeowners and avoid another mortgage and foreclosure crisis, the New York State Banking Department has issued new rules regarding the business practices of mortgage loan servicers. The regulations, which go into effect October 1, include halting foreclosure actions for borrowers being considered for, or currently in, a trial or permanent modification, as well as developing procedures for consumer complaints and ensuring homeowners do not have to submit multiple copies of required documents.