News

The real estate market is looking up in Massachusetts. According to recent reports by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors and The Warren Group, the Bay State saw an increase in prices and sales for both single-family homes and condos in February.

In new policy guidelines released this week, Fannie Mae told servicers that they can no longer name MERS as the plaintiff in any foreclosure action, whether judicial or non-judicial, on a mortgage loan owned or securitized by the GSE. MERS is widely used by the industry to keep track of the servicing rights on home loans, and is often listed as the ""mortgagee of record."" But the system has become the centerpiece of a number of lawsuits, with foreclosed homeowners challenging the naming of the electronic system as mortgagee.

The real estate outlook for the remainder of 2010 is grim. According to a recent online survey of real estate executives conducted by Deloitte, 76 percent of executives expect commercial property values to continue to fall this year, and 73 percent predict asking rents will follow the same trend. When the market will recover still remains unknown, but it will undoubtedly take time. This was echoed by survey respondents, with 92 percent predicting that it will be at least two to four years - some say even longer - before we see a full market recovery.

ISGN Corporation has implemented a new user interface for its LenStar technology, a Web-based attorney and referral communication system for default management that the company says gives servicers access to lenders and attorneys servicing over 25 percent of the residential loans in the United States.

At a briefing of state housing counselors held this week at the HomeFree-USA office in Prince George's County, Maryland, Congressman Steny Hoyer and Raymond Skinner, Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development secretary, both expressed their support for HOPE LoanPort, making Maryland the first state in the nation to publicly endorse the program.

The FDIC announced Thursday that Charlotte, North Carolina's Roundpoint Mortgage Servicing Corporation placed the winning bid for an equity interest in a portfolio of 3,373 residential mortgage loans. Collectively, the loans have an unpaid principal balance of $490.7 million. They were seized by the federal agency from 19 failed banks between August 2008 and March 2009, and half are delinquent.

The Association of Mortgage Investors recently released a detailed set of guiding principles to Congress and regulators for how to overhaul the beleaguered securitization market in a manner that will ensure private sector demand for mortgages in the future, which the association says is crucial to the recovery of the global economy.

Vermont Attorney General William H. Sorrell announced Wednesday that Countrywide Financial Corporation, now a part of Bank of America, has entered into a settlement with his office to resolve claims concerning Countrywide's origination of home loans in past years. The agreement calls for Countrywide to pay $100,000, which will be disbursed to borrowers in the state whose Countrywide loans were foreclosed upon and used for general foreclosure prevention efforts.

Credit Plus, Inc., a credit reporting agency based in Salisbury, Maryland, recently announced that its customers can obtain direct access to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) Technology Open to Approved Lenders (TOTAL) Scorecard though the company's innovative technology.

Freddie Mac is riding the wave of the homebuyer tax credit, hoping it will be incentive enough to entice deal-seekers to snatch up foreclosed properties it has repossessed in the hard-hit Las Vegas and Southern California markets and put a dent in the GSE's swollen inventory of REO properties. Freddie officials announced Thursday that they plan to auction off hundreds of HomeSteps REO properties to individual homebuyers in these areas during the last week of April - just ahead of the contract deadline for the federal tax credit.