Secondary Market

Encore Multi-Family, a subsidiary of Dallas-based Encore Enterprises, Inc., announced Monday that Brad Miller has been named president of the company. Miller has more than three decades' experience in real estate investment and development and brings multiple market expertise in investment analysis, distresses asset acquisition, fee management, and complex land settlements to his new position with the company.

Freddie Mac said Tuesday that its home price index for conventional mortgages it purchased last year registered a 0.4 percent decline from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the fourth quarter of 2009. The GSE was quick to point out that this was a much smaller decline than the 9.5 percent drop in home prices recorded in 2008. Four out of nine census regions posted annual price gains, with the Pacific part of the country leading the way with a 1.6 percent increase.

Valeo Fund, a private equity fund based in Dallas, is being introduced to investors in the United States, Europe, and Latin America who are seeking to invest in the pending recovery in the U.S. commercial real estate (CRE) market.

The FDIC is preparing to auction off a portfolio of loans it acquired from 19 failed bank takeovers. According to a preliminary announcement regarding the sale, the portfolio consists primarily of residential real estate acquisition, development, and construction loans with unpaid principal balances totaling approximately $610 million. About 80 percent of the loans are past due and classified as nonperforming.

Charlotte-based Wachovia Corp., the No. 1 bank in Raleigh-Durham market share, recently won a $10.5 million foreclosure judgment against a Homestead, Florida trailer park owner who planned to build an apartment complex on the property, Triangle Business Journal reported Monday.

Fannie Mae says it needs another $15.3 billion bailout from the U.S. Treasury, after the GSE came up $16.3 billion in the red for the fourth quarter of 2009 and posted a loss of $74.4 billion for all of last year. Although the housing crisis is showing signs of lessening in some major markets, it continues to take its toll on the nation's largest mortgage financier. Fannie Mae's 2009 annual losses widened compared to the $59.8 billion deficit recorded for 2008, and its Q4 results marked the GSE's tenth consecutive quarterly shortfall.

Regulators shut the doors on Carson River Community Bank in Carson City, Nevada and Rainier Pacific Bank in Tacoma, Washington over the weekend. So far in 2010, 22 FDIC-insured institutions have landed on the agency's failed bank list. A separate FDIC list holds the names of banks the federal agency considers to be at-risk of failure. This ""problem list"" grew 27 percent from the third to fourth quarters of last year, to 702.

Moody's Investors Service projects the national rate of underwater homeowners could reach 50 percent by early 2011. Florida's All Statewide Property Corporation says it has found a solution to this dilemma by forming satellite limited partnerships to by bulk mortgages from lenders and reducing principal balances to current market values.

The FDIC has requested comments from the industry on a new regulation that would limit safe harbor protections for assets, including mortgages, which have been securitized by failed banks. FDIC officials say the rule would return some confidence to the tenuous secondary market, but industry trade groups argue that it could have a counter effect of creating ""substantial uncertainty"" for investors and stifle an important financing channel.

The debate over the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continues to heat up. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) released an unpublished proposal to DS News this week that advocates converting the two GSEs into government-chartered, non-profit corporations. Fannie and Freddie's own supervisory agency acknowledges that operating in conservatorship is not a long-term solution for the two companies, but the administration says it will not unveil its plan for the GSEs until 2011.