Daily Dose

Based on a sample of loans originated on the company's platform, Ellie Mae reported that refinances accounted for 51 percent of loan volume in January, a jump of 8 percentage points from December. The spike put refinance share at its highest in more than a year and a half.

For the last three months of 2014, Freddie pulled in $227 million in net income, the company said Thursday, a drop of nearly $2 billion from Q3. The sharp drop came from derivative losses, which totaled $3.4 billion for the quarter as interest rates fell.

With job growth continuing on a strong track, a growing number of housing economists anticipate a comeback in homeownership—particularly among young adults—in the months and years ahead. However, a recent study from Freddie Mac turned up some discouraging results to throw some cold water on economists' high hopes.

First-time buyers accounted for nearly half of homebuyers taking out mortgages in January, improving just slightly from December, according to a metric released by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Isolating only the pool of purchase mortgages guaranteed or insured by the GSEs or the government, AEI estimates the share of first-time buyers was slightly higher at 56 percent.

According to a report released Wednesday by credit reporting firm TransUnion, the average mortgage balance per consumer increased to $187,139 by the end of last year's fourth quarter, up from $185,496 in Q4 2013. The greatest increase in mortgage balances came in the super prime risk category.

The Mortgage Bankers Association's (MBA) weekly measure of mortgage application numbers fell a seasonally adjusted 13.2 percent for the week ending February 13, the group reported Wednesday.

Homebuilders broke ground on new homes at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.07 million in January, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. January's rate of new construction was 2.0 percent below December's revised estimate of 1.09 million units annually but 18.7 percent above the year-ago pace of 897,000 units.

Analyzing transactions from 53 major metros nationwide, RE/MAX's latest National Housing Report showed home sales plunged 32.1 percent from December to January, more than wiping out the prior month's 14.4 percent gain.

According to the class-action lawsuit, which was originally filed in September 2008, the underwriters made "material misstatements and omissions of material facts" in the offering documents, which was in violation of the Securities Act.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York said Tuesday that outstanding household debt increased $117 billion from the third quarter of last year to the fourth, putting total indebtedness at about $11.8 trillion as of the end of 2014. Balances went up across most categories, led by a $39 billion increase in mortgage debt to a total of $8.2 trillion.