News

Lender Processing Services, Inc. (LPS) recently announced that its LPS Auction Solutions division will conduct an online auction of foreclosed homes from the hard-hit states of Arizona, California, and Nevada.

An increase in purchase activity for the week ending March 5, 2010 caused mortgage loan application volume to nudge up 0.5 percent on a seasonally-adjusted basis from the prior week, the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) reported Wednesday. According to MBA's Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey, the seasonally-adjusted Purchase Index increased 5.7 percent on a week-to-week basis, but the Refinance Index fell 1.5 percent.

Economists believe the nation's subprime mortgage meltdown and foreclosure crisis will continue to worsen unless innovative thinking reinvents the system. RebuildUS LLC says it's operating under precisely this premise by bypassing the banks and auctions to move Americans back into affordable homeownership through its newly-launched online foreclosure marketplace.

Foreclosures continue to drive down home prices in hard-hit states like Michigan, but according to the auction company Hudson & Marshall of Texas, this is good news for buyers and investors looking for bargains on homes.

In response to the new regulations under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), Advantage Title, Inc. has launched GFEz--a RESPA-compliant Good Faith Estimate (GFE) rate calculator that delivers easy online calculation of title- and escrow-related fees.

Both the House bill for financial regulatory reform and the draft Senate bill currently being debated include across-the-board risk retention provisions for home mortgages. The idea is to ensure lenders have more ""skin in the game,"" to prevent the risky practices that ignited the housing crisis. But according to a new study by the Community Mortgage Banking Project, such mandated risk retention is ""no substitute"" for good underwriting and could significantly raise the cost of home mortgages.

In an announcement Tuesday, Dartappraisal.com, a Troy, Michigan-based provider of nationwide residential real estate valuations, said it has integrated with FirstClose, a service of First Lenders Data Inc. (FLDI), an Austin, Texas-based technology solutions provider to mortgage lenders nationwide.

With the buy-now attitude fading, national home price reduction levels continued to decrease this month, according to a recent report by San Francisco-based Trulia, Inc., a real estate search engine. As of March 1, 19 percent of listings on the market had experienced at least one price cut, falling 10 percent from the previous month to the lowest level since Trulia began tracking price reductions in April 2009.

National Quick Sale announced Tuesday that it has entered into a business partnership agreement with real estate and mortgage services provider Hollander Financial Holding Inc. Through this venture, National Quick Sale plans to promote the use of its short sale platform's capabilities through Hollander's nationwide network of real estate professionals.

In an effort to attract buyers, home sellers in major cities throughout Florida are reducing prices by more than 10 percent, according to a monthly survey of home listings conducted by ZipRealty, an online real estate brokerage based in Emeryville, California.