Secondary Market

Conforming loan limits will remain untouched throughout most of the country for 2015, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) revealed Monday.

Wells Fargo and Ocwen Financial have mutually agreed to cancel the sale of billions of dollars residential mortgage servicing rights after New York's top financial regulator put the deal on hold, according to multiple reports.

Two of the country's biggest banks have agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to settle a suit claiming they failed to protect investors of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) in the wake of the subprime crash.

According to Fannie Mae, the increase was driven primarily by lower fair value losses and an increase in revenues. Also contributing to the third-quarter boost in profits was a recently announced settlement between Goldman Sachs and the GSEs' conservator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), over faulty residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS).

Chartered as a national bank in 1880, NBRS converted to a Maryland charter in 2002. Following the financial crisis of last decade, the bank took years of losses from non-performing assets and was never able to find enough capital to return to sound condition, said Acting Commissioner Gordon Cooley of the state's financial regulation office.

The number of listings last month was approximately 1.87 million, down 2.7 percent annually and 7.9 percent monthly. The decline compares to Redfin's latest analysis, which showed an unexpected bump in inventory from new listings. Redfin's data measures a narrower list of markets nationwide.

A former branch manager of an Alabama bank that received assistance through the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was sentenced after pleading guilty to fraud, Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP) announced recently.

Morgan Stanley's third quarter 2014 net revenues of $8.9 marked an increase from $8.0 billion from the same period a year ago, the investment bank reported in its Q3 2014 earnings statement released on Friday.

About 87 percent of the 133 million total residential housing units in the U.S. in 2013 were reported to be occupied, according to the findings of the 2013 American Housing Survey (AHS) released earlier this week by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Census Bureau.

Looking at compliance challenges, 72 percent of banker respondents listed "maintaining compliance with changing regulations" as one of their top concerns, up from 67 percent at the start of last year, while 69 percent said just keeping track of regulations is a major issue at this point.