News

Florida's Ocwen Loan Servicing has acquired the residential mortgage servicing rights on 38,000 loans with an aggregate unpaid principal balance of $6.9 billion. Sources confirm Saxon Mortgage Services, the Texas-based subsidiary of Morgan Stanley, as the seller.

Following the severe flooding in Rhode Island, HUD recently instituted a 90-day moratorium on foreclosures of Federal Housing Administration (FHA)-insured mortgages in four counties across the state, including Kent, Newport, Providence, and Washington. While the foreclosure suspension is only mandated for FHA-insured mortgages in these counties, Rhode Island's Attorney General, Patrick Lynch, is asking all lenders to consider voluntary moratoria on non-FHA mortgages as well.

Last November, the board of commissioners of Cook County, Illinois, agreed to include a $3 million amendment in the county's budget in order to create a mortgage foreclosure mediation program. The program, which applies to Cook County residential properties that are owner-occupied, single family homes or individual condominium units and owner-occupied residential properties with four units or less, officially launched on Monday.

This year has seen a big decline in the number of non-bank mortgage lenders to close down, but the improvement has been offset by a spike in failed financial institutions. From January 1 through April 9, 2010, there have been a total of 55 mortgage-related closings. At about the same point last year, there were 50 closings. The increase traces directly to institutional bank failures, which have doubled compared to a year earlier. Non-bank mortgage operations to close, on the other hand, are two-thirds lower than where they stood at this time last year.

Countdown To Buy, a next-generation online real estate marketplace, announced Monday that it has entered into a new pilot program with a leading lending institution of offer a sampling of foreclosed properties located in Arizona, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Washington, D.C., and Wisconsin. In addition the company has received additional properties in both Connecticut and Texas from existing clients after successfully generating accepted offers is 25 days or less on all properties placed on the platform.

With refinancing in the commercial real estate (CRE) sector hard to come by and delinquencies continuing to rise, special servicers of commercial mortgages are dealing with large influxes of new troubled loans. Primary and master servicers ranked by Standard & Poor's reported that delinquent CRE loans hit a new all-time high at the end of 2009. A separate study by the research firm Delta Associates says that the aggregate value of distressed commercial real estate in the U.S. has now surpassed $187 billion.

San Diego-based MDA DataQuick, a division of MDA Lending Solutions and an independent provider of property data to real estate and mortgage professionals, recently announced that it has secured more than $2.6 million in contracts with four of the top 10 financial institutions in the United States.

Earlier this month, the online real estate auction house RealtyBid.com launched a Web site redesign and upgrade. According to the company's CEO Tony Isbell, the revamp is just another step in RealtyBid.com's ongoing quest to ""continually enhance the user experience while providing exceptional customer service and great deals on real estate.""

West Palm Beach, Florida-based Ocwen Loan Servicing, a provider of residential and commercial loan servicing, special servicing, and asset management services, announced Friday that it has seen marked success in its fight against foreclosure after just three months of using MKDirect, a MortgageKeeper Referral Services product that connects homeowners to high-quality nonprofit government services.

Kennedy Wilson, an international real estate investment and services company headquartered in Beverly Hills, California, has agreed to acquire Sachse Real Estate, a commercial brokerage and property management firm also based in Beverly Hills. This combination will expand the retail capabilities of Kennedy Wilson's investments, brokerage, and management services offerings, and it will give Sachse Real Estate's retail operations a larger platform to source deals, provide equity, and invest in transactions.