Tag Archives: Attorneys & Title Companies

Pacific Union Financial LLC is the latest preferred investor with Lenders One Mortgage Cooperative. Through the partnership, Lenders One members will be able to expand their products lines in order to take on competitive aggregators. Lenders One, a national alliance of community mortgage bankers, product suppliers, and correspondent lenders, will gain support from Pacific Union for both its retail and wholesale platforms.

Treasury special adviser Raj Date made headlines again after announcing Tuesday that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau plans to finalize the ability-to-repay rule early next year. His remarks follow a series of other barnstorming speeches in the ramp-up for several rules. Once approved, the new rule, formerly proposed by the Federal Reserve, will broaden the scope of Regulation Z under Truth-in-Lending and prevent lenders from making loans to consumers without qualifying assets and income.

With fears on the rise about a Greek default, stocks for U.S. companies and lenders fell around midday Monday. Speaking with MReport, federal regulatory agencies downplayed the fears despite quarterly numbers that found an expansion in lending volume between wobbly euro zone and U.S. financial institutions over the first quarter. New worries about a spreading debt contagion arose over the weekend when European Union officials reached an impasse in bailout talks.

Commercial real estate loans are making Wall Street headlines again. Joint financing options are becoming increasingly abundant for financial firms struggling to handle the fall out from recent volatility in the commercial mortgage-backed securities market. During the summer, yields rose steadily, increasing the need for investor protection measures. As part of events underway, Barclays CApital announced a partnership with FundCore Finance Group to conduct CMBS loans jointly.

Enhanced technology initiatives for wholesale and correspondent lenders is now available thanks to ClosingCorp's new platform. The company recently announced that it would release the SmartGFE Service, targeting streamlined processing for entities in both markets. ClosingCorp's SmartGFE product will provide instant access to RESPA-based Good Faith Estimate (GFE) data to those in the wholesale and correspondent segments.

Even as the good news emerged that fewer banks are failing countrywide, Bloomberg News found that the nation's biggest lenders have lost some $65.7 billion in bad mortgage-backed securities, with billions in the red. A number of suits by mortgage lenders, one against the other, plus a barrage of action to recover losses for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac suggest more losses may be in store for U.S. financial institutions. Market watchers disagree over whether culpability is needed in lieu of the bad economy.

If recent remarks by Treasury adviser Raj Date signal anything, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau means to press forward with the responsibilities enshrined for it under the Dodd-Frank Act. The CFPB holdover, who filled the shoes of Elizabeth Warren, now a Senate candidate, explored events in the lead-up to the controversial bureau even as an unwavering Republican opposition holds the line. Assuming responsibility for 18 consumer financial laws, the CFPB has moved forward with rules and proposals.

The phrase family business found a new meaning this week as arrests and jail sentences followed for two men and their children that authorities corralled for bilking lenders and homeowners. Also making the mortgage fraud blotter Friday: five businessmen from Iowa and over a dozen defendants from Miami. The victims included a widow, homeowners in distress, and lenders. MReport pooled the latest in mortgage fraud news from cases nestled in the pages of newspapers from around the country.

Chatter about a sudden sweep of bank failures may be all the rage in Europe, but fewer closures for financial institutions stateside led the FDIC to shutter a temporary office in the Midwest on Friday. The glacial crawl for U.S. bank failures makes good on FDIC predictions that fewer institutions would fail over 2011 as more ledgers stay in the black - a change of pace for an era in which the federal agency closed a record number of banks. The FDIC said Friday that it would close the Midwest Temporary Satellite Office in Illinois.

In another twist for the nation's largest mortgage lenders, Wells Fargo upped the ante against JPMorgan Chase & Co. by filing a suit in a Delaware court to order the latter to buy back over $558 million in bad mortgage-backed securities. Multiple news outlets offered up the latest tizzy Thursday, with Wells escalating the case after JPMorgan refused to budge on the repurchases. The loans stem from the Bear Stearns Mortgage Funding Trust 2007-AR2, otherwise known as the EMC unit, which JPMorgan acquired in 2008.