News

Real estate data provider Altos Research is taking a very bearish outlook on the housing market. The company says that ominous shadow inventory of distressed properties hanging over the industry will lock home prices into a downward trajectory for the remainder of this year, with property values starting out 2011 even lower than they were in 2009. Add to that the fact that the pool of viable buyers out there is shrinking, and you've got an equation that Altos says is a sign of real market weakness.

DocuTech Corp, an Idaho Falls, Idaho-based provider of compliance services and documentation technology for the mortgage industry, recently announced that it signed 25 new clients in the first two quarters of this year, marking 14 consecutive quarters of growth for the 19-year-old company. According to DocuTech, lenders look to the company for sophisticated, but not complicated, mortgage document tools that seamlessly integrate with existing loan origination systems, thus enabling mortgage professionals to generate documents locally.

The Federal Reserve has decided to raise the dollar amount of mortgage fees that trigger additional regulatory disclosure requirements under the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) and the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act of 1994 (HOEPA). On Friday, the central bank's board of governors issued an adjustment to the rule, bumping the amount of the fee-based trigger up 2 percent to $592, effective January 1, 2011. Currently that threshold is set at $579.

Fannie Mae has opened a mortgage help center in the Windy City in order to provide counseling and other services for struggling homeowners in the greater metro area with loans owned by the GSE. The new center in Chicago is the second facility and third announced partnership in Fannie Mae's planned series of mortgage help centers across the country. The GSE said it partnered on this initiative with Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, major mortgage servicers, and civic and community leaders from across the region.

The two corporate names linked in recent weeks to high-profile settlements with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over questionable practices related to mortgage investments are teaming up to bring to market the year's third multi-borrower bond backed by commercial real estate. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are putting together a $788.5 million commercial mortgage-backed security (CMBS) offering comprised of debt from 48 retail and office properties.

HUD recently announced the availability of $79 million in grants for a broad range of housing counseling programs to help families find and preserve housing. This represents an increase of $21 million, or 27 percent, over last year's funding. According to HUD, these grants will be awarded competitively to approximately 550 HUD-approved counseling agencies and state housing finance agencies across the nation to help families stave off foreclosure, avoid mortgage scams, and improve their credit scores.

Mortgage rates have hit record lows across the nation, but not as low as the rate being offered through a new program in West Virginia. According to a recent announcement by the state's governor, the West Virginia Housing Development Fund has launched a new mortgage program for West Virginia families that includes a 30-year loan at a fixed rate of approximately 3.5 percent. This historically-low rate is achieved as a result of a $35 million bond issue coupled with a special bond refunding by the Housing Development Fund. However, funds for this program are limited.

The percentage of loans 90 or more days past due held by the nation's largest mortgage company has declined for three months in a row. According to a new monthly summary report released by Fannie Mae on Friday, the GSE's single-family serious delinquency rate dropped 15 basis points to 5.15 percent in May. That follows a decline of 17 basis points in April and 12 basis points in March. The March reading was the first time Fannie's delinquency rate had dropped since March 2007, when it was a mere 0.62 percent.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday charged Citigroup Inc. with misleading investors about the company's exposure to subprime mortgage-related assets. The SEC also charged former CFO Gary Crittenden and Arthur Tildesley, Jr., currently the head of cross marketing at Citigroup, for their roles in causing the company to falsely state in an SEC filing that its subprime exposure was a quarter of what it really was in 2007, just as the mortgage market was rapidly deteriorating.

Despite recent increases in a number of the industry's home price measurements, and even an uptick in the company's own index of residential property prices, Fiserv Inc. says the gains will be short-lived. The information technology firm is forecasting home prices to fall by another 4.9 percent over the next 12 months, as unemployment remains high, mortgage rates rise, and markets such as Florida, Arizona, and Nevada add even more distressed properties to their inventories.