News

Nationwide, one in every 200 residential loans funded last year, totaling $14 billion, involved fraud, according to First American CoreLogic. Despite what looks like an unsettling amount of shadiness lurking within the mortgage market, the company says the fraud rate has been steadily declining for the past three years and is now about 25 percent lower than when it peaked in the third quarter of 2007.

The Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco has filed suit against nine securities dealers - including some of the nation's biggest lenders - alleging they made untrue statements related to the federal bank's investments in private-label residential mortgage-backed securities.

Michaelson, Connor, & Boul, Inc. of Huntington Beach, California was recently hired by HUD to ensure that FHA-approved lenders and servicers convey foreclosed properties to the agency in acceptable condition.

Home prices in extremely overvalued U.S. metropolitan areas declined nearly 37 percent on average between 2005 and the fourth quarter 2009, according to IHS Global Insight. At the peak of the bubble, nearly half of the metros in IHS' study were considered ""overvalued."" Now, not a single market can make that claim. In fact, nationally, the company says housing is 8.9 percent undervalued. And new data from Altos Research suggests that prices in many of the hardest-hit markets are still on a slippery downward slope.

The first Retaining Occupancy on Foreclosure (ROOF) Agreement was recently signed in the city of Detroit. Created to help combat the blight problems in Detroit by cutting down on the number of homes left vacant after foreclosure, the goal of the program is to salvage Detroit neighborhoods and greatly reduce the number of vacant homes by keeping foreclosed homes occupied by either the owner or tenant until the property is sold at an REO sale.

In two separate reports released this week, Fannie Mae took a look at the past and made predictions for the future. On Thursday, the government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) released ""Helping Housing Recover: A Report on Fannie Mae's Mission Performance,"" describing the company's efforts to provide liquidity, stability, and affordability to the nation's housing finance system. On Wednesay, the GSE released its March 2010 Economic Outlook, cutting its mortgage origination predictions for this year.

With financing for both residential and commercial real estate mortgages still tight, and the securitization market all but stagnant by historical standards, policymakers have been pushing lenders to get the wheels of finance churning again. It's a fine line to walk with new regulatory compliance issues and constrained capital, but Rep. Scott Garrett thinks he has the answer - covered bonds. They represent a $3 trillion market and are a major source of mortgage liquidity among European nations.

Servicers are working faster and more diligently to convert trial modifications to permanent status under the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). But the bitter truth is that some homeowners won't qualify for long-term relief even after making their trial payments. To offer these homeowners another option, Fannie Mae is instituting the ""Alternative Modification"" (Alt Mod) and requiring all its servicers to evaluate a borrower for the new solution before proceeding with foreclosure.

Pathfinder Partners, LLC, a San Diego-based company that invests in distressed real estate and defaulted loans, recently teamed up with Denver's Pittman Development Group to launch the Pittman Pathfinder Colorado Opportunity Fund, a new private equity fund focused on acquiring real estate assets throughout Colorado.

For the first time in two years, commercial real estate investors are expressing a renewed sense of optimism about the future. Based on their responses to a quarterly survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, investors believe the worst has passed and a commercial real estate recovery is on the horizon. According to the survey findings, investors believe owners and lenders are finally coming to grips with what assets are truly worth, and as a result they expect sales activity in 2010 to be a marked improvement over 2009.