Home >> Featured (page 859)

Featured

Hudson & Marshall, Genesis Auctions to Merge

Hudson & Marshall seeks to pair the reputation with the nation’s leading servicers, lenders, credit unions, GSEs, asset management firms, and investors with Genesis Auction’s investor marketing and affiliation with Genesis Capital, a private bridge lender to investors active in distressed single-family real estate.

Read More »

Home Prices Up 4.5 Percent Year-Over-Year

Black Knight Financial Services released its latest Home Price Index Report Monday, which showed that home prices nationwide were down an almost-flat 0.1 percent in December. At the same time, 2014 ended with sale prices doing 4.5 percent better than a year prior.

Read More »

HARP Volume Down; FHFA Targeting More Potential Customers

refinance

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is still refinancing plenty of loans through Home Affordable Refinance Program ‒‒ in fact more HARP refinances were done in December than in any other month of 2014 ‒‒ but HARP refinances are significantly down from a year ago, even if FHFA believes it has many more potential customers out there.

Read More »

Home Affordability Inches Up in Q4

Using home price data from CoreLogic, NAHB estimated that 62.8 percent of homes sold at the national median price in Q4 were affordable to families earning the U.S. median income of $63,900. That figure was up 1 percentage point from the third quarter.

Read More »

Profits Shrink at Fannie Mae

For all of 2014, Fannie reported profits totaling $14.2 billion, down from $84 billion in 2013. Like its sister company, Freddie Mac, Fannie's 2013 results got a major boost from a one-time benefit related to deferred tax assets and a surge in funds from securities settlements.

Read More »

Survey Finds Low Satisfaction, High Hopes Among Originators

In its fifth annual survey of loan originators, national recruiting firm Hammerhouse LLC found that out of more than 800 respondents, 56 percent are finding that while they still consider their job rewarding—both personally and financially—it's now less so than it was in the past.

Read More »

Refi Share Makes Comeback in January

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.

Read More »

Freddie Mac Ekes Out Profit Despite Derivative Losses

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.

Read More »

First-Time Homebuyer Share Inches Up in January

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.

Read More »

Housing Starts, Permits Fall in January

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.

Read More »