REO

While rising home prices have lifted many underwater homeowners to positions of positive equity, the real estate information and analytics provider DataQuick warns tight credit will still preclude many traditional buyers from the market. Instead, investors will continue to carry an outsized portion of the purchase market for the foreseeable future, according to DataQuick.

Hubzu, an online real estate marketplace, has a new leader on board. The company named Eric M. Koenig as its new president. Koenig has experience driving growth initiatives for technology brands, having served most recently as COO and SVP of global business operations at Expedia.

""Modest to moderate"" economic growth continues to be the theme at the Federal Reserve, which this week released its Beige Book, tracking expansion across the 12 Fed districts from October through mid-November. The central bank reported improvements in residential real estate activity in the Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and San Francisco regions, with single-family home sales softening in most of the remaining districts.

LOGS Network announced Wednesday that it has made a strategic addition to its leadership team with the addition of Scott Brinkley as the organization's new CEO. Before joining LOGS, Brinkley held executive positions for two decades with First American and CoreLogic. He also co-founded a large claims processing business and most recently was CEO of the Illinois foreclosure law firm Pierce and Associates.

Distressed inventory is on the decline, but the number of months it will take to clear these distressed homes from the market is on the rise. According to the latest report from Morningstar Credit Ratings, distressed inventory among non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities dropped 20 percent to 891,000 properties as of September. However, Morningstar says it will take 49 months to work through this inventory given current market dynamics. That's 11 months longer than the assessment in 2012.

In a report released this week, Clear Capital linked high levels of distressed sales activity with high levels of home price appreciation, something that may seem out of the ordinary. However, in a conversation with DS News Wednesday, the company's VP of research and analytics explained that this trend is in keeping with the ""first-in-first-out"" recovery the nation has been experiencing over the past 18 months.

Hudson & Marshall will auction more than 150 single-family properties for the FDIC using a specially tailored version of the company's online and offline auction process. Five separate auctions will take place from December 4–10 on properties located in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina.

Home prices are keeping with their trend of slow, but steady, month-to-month improvements. CoreLogic's October Home Price Index (HPI) reveals a 0.2 percent month-month rise in the national home price but a 12.5 percent year-year increase. October marked the 20th straight month of annual price gains, according to CoreLogic, which conceded in its latest report that appreciation was beginning to fall more in line with normal seasonal patterns.

While analysts across the industry are reporting waning price gains as we head toward winter, Clear Capital also points out another interesting and perhaps counterintuitive trend occurring in the housing market. Prior to the recovery, high saturations of distressed sales correlated with falling prices, but today's market reveals a switch, with high levels of distressed sales taking place alongside higher price gains.

Title365 Company, a provider of title insurance and escrow services based in California, announced the hiring of Jeremy Harmon as SVP of national sales. Harmon has spent nearly 20 years in the industry.