As home sales and home prices in the Miami metro area continue to post gains, absentee buyers and cash purchases make up a sizable portion of the market, according to San Francisco-based DataQuick's March report. March was the 11th consecutive month of annual home sale gains in Miami and the 15th consecutive month of annual median price increases in the metro.

National Asset Direct, Inc. (NAD) and the iServe Companies announced the appointment of Sean Galaise as director of business development. Galaise was selected for the role to drive new growth and develop strategic partnerships for the iServe Companies.

Williams & Williams, a real estate auction company, partnered with distressed asset management company iServe Default Management Solutions to provide a complete end-to-end short sale solution.

The rate of new loans that rolled into serious delinquency fell below 1 percent for the first time since 2007, Lender Processing Services (LPS) reported Monday. The new problem loan rate--defined as seriously delinquent mortgages that were current six months ago--inched down toward pre-crisis levels to 0.84 percent in March. The new problem loan rate averaged 0.55 percent from 2000 to 2004. As expected, when categorizing borrowers by equity position, LPS found borrowers with higher levels of negative equity tended to have higher new problem loan rates.

MountainView Capital Holdings, a fixed income capital markets firm specializing in residential mortgage assets, appointed Art Yeend as managing director and head of sales and marketing.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announced the fourth round of checks from the foreclosure review settlement was sent Friday, May 3. The most recent batch includes 233,404 checks totaling more than $224 million, which brings the overall total to 3.9 million checks valued at $3.4 billion. As of May 2, more than 1.8 million recipients have cashed or deposited nearly $1.7 billion in checks from the foreclosure agreement reached in January between federal regulators and 13 servicers.

Without a government guarantee, Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's multifamily businesses would be less viable and ""have little inherent value,"" according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), the entities' conservator. As the FHFA works toward its goal of winding down the GSEs' presence in the market, the conservator required each GSE to determine whether its multifamily business could operate without a government guarantee. Both GSEs suggest without a government guarantee, their multifamily units would not be able to support affordable housing programs.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are offering a relief program to victims of Superstorm Sandy who were current on their mortgage before the storm, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced in a release Thursday. According to the release, the program is in response to letters the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) sent in April, which urged for a change in what Cuomo's administration called ""restrictive"" guidelines that could lead to a spike in mortgage payments for Sandy victims.

Imagine if someone removed the speedometer from your car and then put limits on how fast or slow you could drive. That's what 11 House members are doing with legislation which would prohibit the Census Bureau from any data collection except for the decennial headcount of Americans. The impact of the bill HR 1638 would be to eviscerate and effectively eliminate the monthly employment situation report that produces, among other things, the unemployment rate as well as a host of other bits of data about the economy. The sponsors of the bill must believe that if we don't count unemployment it won't exist.

In a recent report, Radar Logic closely examined purchase trends and patterns from institutional investors in the Atlanta area. Among its findings, the research firm found investors have been targeting a different cross-section of homes compared to traditional buyers. According to the report, institutional investors are more likely to purchase homes that are cheaper, smaller, and located in lower-income areas compared to homes bought by non-investor buyers.