Origination

Zillow saw a 16.6 percent decline in its overall number of listed homes in February, indicating an inventory crunch as buyers start to feel more comfortable getting into the market.

Following an industry report on immigrants in the American housing market, Residential Finance Corporation announced a new program for foreign and immigrant homebuyers.

In Tennessee, Quality Mortgage Services, LLC announced the opening of QMiS Systems, a provider of knowledge processing outsourcing (KPO) and business processing outsourcing (BPO) designed to serve the financial services and banking industries.

February's increase in mortgage interest rates took some of the heat out of the refinancing boom, Capital Economics says in its latest US Housing Data Response. Capital Economics' report, which compiles application data from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), shows application volume fell 0.3 percent month-over-month in February. That decline, however, is still an improvement over January, which saw a 2.5 percent drop in applications from December.

Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation, one of the nation's largest mortgage banks, announced the hiring of Phyllis Cheong and Pattie Wainright-Hosti as senior loan officers serving Georgia's greater Savannah area.

Global DMS and MortgageFlex announced that Global DMS' eTrac Enterprise platform is now integrated with MortgageFlex's LoanQuest loan origination system (LOS).

Bill Armstrong, founder and chairman of Colorado-based Blueberry Systems, LLC, was named by the Leadership Program of the Rockies (LPR) as the recipient of its 2013 Legacy Award.

While more than 90 percent of homes purchased in 2011 were existing homes, more than half of homebuyers declared a preference for new homes, according to the National Association of Home Builders' (NAHB) Characteristics of Home Buyers, an analysis of the 2011 American Housing Survey conducted by the Census Bureau. Along with their preference for new homes, survey respondents expressed a desire for energy-efficient homes. According to NAHB, these two qualities go hand-in-hand.

Buyer demand continues to climb as 2013 marches on, according to results in Redfin's most recent Real-Time Demand Pulse.

CoreLogic's Home Price Index (HPI) saw its greatest yearly increase in nearly seven years in January, the analytics provider revealed Tuesday. Home prices nationwide--including distressed sales--rose on a year-over-year basis by 9.7 percent in January. The spike represents the biggest increase since April 2006, CoreLogic said. CoreLogic's Pending HPI, a metric measuring current trends in home prices, indicates that prices (including distressed sales) in February will likely match January's year-over-year improvement.