News

Most of the complaints boil down to consumer confusion over the terms of a loan. The most common complaint is that borrowers are unable to refinance. Related, many consumers dislike that they cannot change the terms of the loan.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) will be trying to get the more than 20,000 New Jersey residents still eligible to sign up for the Home Affordable Refinance Program at their fifth outreach event to be held in Newark on March 4.

Home prices were a mixed bag in December with nine cities showing increases, six cities recording decreases, and five cities showing relatively flat changes. The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, released Tuesday, show the national housing index fell 0.1 percent from November to December. However, the 10- and 20-city indices instead rose with a slight increase of 0.1 percent month-to-month.

The Housing and Insurance Subcommittee of the House Committee on Financial Services will hold the second hearing in the series, entitled The Future of Housing in America: Oversight of the Federal Housing Administration, Part II, on Thursday, February 26, beginning at 10 a.m. Eastern time.

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.

There are approximately 81,000 loans in the portfolio involved in the transaction, according to Ocwen's announcement. The transaction is subject to a definitive agreement as well as approval from Freddie Mac as well as Freddie Mac's conservator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).

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.

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.

There’s good news and bad news for January’s existing-home sales, according to the National Association of Realtors. On the one hand, sales in January, for the fourth straight month, were ahead of the pace of sales a year ago. On the other hand, existing-home sales in all major regions declined last month to their lowest rate in nine months, with the West and Northeast getting the worst of it.

The American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) International Center on Housing Risk reported another rise in mortgage origination risk in January, marking five straight months of increasingly risky lending. Researchers at the center say the rise in risk is due to a shift in market share from large banks to non-banks, whose practices are "substantially riskier than the large bank business."