Tag Archives: Processing

The rocky economic landscape could give way to a smoother housing sector if recent home prices signal anything, with a major Standard & Poor├â┬ó├óÔÇÜ┬¼├óÔÇ×┬ós/Case-Shiller index revealing Tuesday a marginal uptick in numbers over July. Economists chalked up the gains to a seasonal boost and suggested more stability may be on the way for a troubled housing economy. The indices reflected a 0.9-percent boon for measures of activity across 10 and 20 major metropolitan cities, a consecutive four-month increase.

After a drought for good news, markets and mortgage lenders found reason to celebrate Monday with a late-day flood by investors to their stocks. Confidence-boosting measures by government officials led the charge by investors to lenders like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, with central bankers in Europe mustering up an aid package for debt-ridden countries.

Investment company Chrysalis Holdings, LLC, has added a new face to its board of directors, recently appointing Rear Admiral Thomas C. Lynch to its membership.

A new acquisition is in the works for Ranieri Real Estate Partners LP (RREP) and WL Ross & Co. LLC. The companies are teaming up to purchase Deutsche Bank Berkshire Mortgage.

Even with new-home sales tanking and recession fears redoubling over August, more renters clung onto the hope of homeownership, with 59 percent still aspiring to pocket a pair of keys and ink their names to mortgages, according to Trulia. The consensus: more than half of all homeowners believe in making the home their most important investment. According to Trulia, 70 percent of survey respondents held firmly to the idea that homeownership is central to the American Dream.

Despite the lure of record-low mortgage rates, fewer consumers stepped out from behind the fear of a global economic slowdown to purchase new homes, curtailing new sales by 2.3 percent month-over-month in August. Market watchers chalked up a six-month dearth to consumers wary about their job security, stock markets, and the threat of a new recession. The Census Bureau signaled a fallback to 295,000 housing units on a seasonally adjusted basis, down from 302,000 from July.

Two financial institutions bucked a trendy crawl for bank failures by folding Friday, pushing the 2011 tally to 73. The FDIC swooped in to corral the fallout from the collapse of Nevada City-based Citizens Bank of Northern California and Norkfolk-based Bank of the Commonwealth, paying out for the former and keeping assets from the latter for disposition. California state regulators turned off the lights at Citizens Bank, while their Virginia counterparts shuttered the Bank of the Commonwealth.

Crooked cops, money-launderers, and criminal enterprises have made headlines in the mortgage business recently, with state and federal officials nabbing dozens for diverse fraud schemes.

Ahead of lower limits for conforming jumbo loans, nearly assured in October as Congress disagrees even over stopgap spending bills, the Federal Reserve offered a revealing look at the market Friday by releasing a report on the health of the housing market. The consensus: falling limits will likely only nudge the jumbo loan market, not tip it over, as some critics claim. The Fed found that the current criteria for a jumbo fences in only 1.3 percent of all loans backed by GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Bank of America green-lighted another restructuring move Friday, with news breaking that the mortgage giant signed off on an $880-million selloff in commercial real-estate loans. Multiple news reports held that the portfolio, worth about $1 billion to a cluster of investors, will benefit from a bevy of discounts. Who benefits? According to multiple news outlets, a venture created by Canyon Capital Realty Advisors LLC, Invesco Ltd., and Square Mile Capital Management LLC will sop up the loans.