News

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.

Despite servicers' efforts to modify unprecedented volumes of troubled mortgages and a large-scale government-led program put in place to stem the nation's viral foreclosure epidemic, they haven't been enough to keep up with the rapid pace of loan deterioration, according to new data from Lender Processing Services (LPS). An LPS market report released Monday shows that the total number of delinquent loans as of the end of February was 21 percent higher than it was a year earlier, and the foreclosure rate represents a 51 percent year-over-year increase.

Oklahoma Housing Finance Agency (OFHA) announced Monday that it will release $75 million in mortgage revenue bonds on April 27 through its OHFA Advantage program, marking one of the agency's largest single distributions in recent years. This $75 million is just part of the $300 million OHFA anticipates releasing this year through the utilization of the New Issue Bond Program.

According to Bank of America's monthly Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) progress report to the Department of Treasury, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank has completed nearly 33,000 permanent HAMP modifications, including more than 12,000 since the previous monthly report. As of April 8, 2010, 32,900 Bank of America customers had been placed into completed mortgage modifications with affordable payments under HAMP, up from 20,666 reported a month earlier. This marked the bank's most productive month to date.