Year-over-Year Home Price Declines Continue: Report

Home prices have declined by at least 10 percent on a year-over-year basis for 11 consecutive months and February preview data indicates the trend will continue, according to a report released Monday by First American CoreLogic. National resale housing prices fell 11.6 percent in January from a year ago. The number of metropolitan markets experiencing price [...]

Economist Sees Ray of Hope for Home Prices

The rate of decline in home prices across key U.S. markets continued to slow in October compared to one year earlier, evidence of what one economist says may be a forming trough in home price depreciation. A home price index published by First American CoreLogic, released earlier this week, found that home prices across the [...]

Litton Gets Alt-A Servicer Rating from Fitch

When firms like Litton Loan Servicing, LP begin getting rated for Alt-A servicing, you just know there’s trouble in the sector: Fitch Ratings said earlier this week that it had assigned the Houston-based servicing platform for Alt-A products at RPS1, the agency’s highest rating for any servicer. Litton cut its teeth in the wild and [...]

Massachusetts AG Wins Injunction, Right to Review Foreclosures

Servicing 9,700 Option One Mortgage Corp.-originated mortgages in Massachusetts just got a little bit more difficult for American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc., after the state’s AG won a preliminary injunction against the now-defunct lender on Wednesday afternoon. The order, granted Monday by Judge Ralph D. Gants in Suffolk Superior Court, prohibits Option One and AHMSI from [...]

Economic Picture Pressures Housing, Foreclosures

In applied statistics, it’s called the second derivative — the basic concept of a derivative can be thought of as how much a quantity is changing at some given point, and a second derivative is the measure of how much that change is itself changing. While it’s a somewhat obtuse concept, it describes to a [...]

Popular Sells U.S. Mortgage Platform to Goldman

In a brief press statement released Friday morning, Popular, Inc. (BPOP: 2.45 +0.41%) said it had entered into an agreement to sell its U.S. mortgage subsidiary Popular Financial Holdings to various affiliates of Goldman Sachs (GS: 170.01 -1.63%). The deal includes both loan and servicing assets of the mortgage operation, in a deal worth roughly [...]

Goldman Integrates Avelo, Litton Loan Servicing

Litton Loan Servicing, LP is now the de facto servicing arm of Goldman Sachs (GS: 170.01 -1.63%), with the Wall Street bank having completed integration of the two shops early last month, sources suggested to HW on Tuesday morning. Acknowledging the integration, Fitch Ratings said Tuesday morning that it had withdrawn all residential servicer ratings from [...]

Calfornia Senate Approves Foreclosure Warning Bill

The California Assembly appears to have passed its first major piece of legislation surrounding the nation’s housing mess, passing a bill designed to give homeowners both more and earlier warnings that their mortgages were moving into default. The measure, SB1137, passed by a wide 32-8 vote Wednesday and is headed to Calif. governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; [...]

Mortgage REIT Insider: Capital Trust Crashes

The commercial mortgage REITs started the week behind the proverbial eight-ball, as Monday’s sour news from CapitalSource Inc. (CSE: 3.78 -4.06%) and a harsh downgrade of Capital Trust, Inc. (CT: 1.30 -0.76%) set the week’s tone for the sector. It was all downhill from there. Capital Trust was downgraded from Neutral to Sell at UBS [...]

CapitalSource Sells $1.5 Billion in Agency MBS

CapitalSource Inc. (CSE: 3.78 -4.06%), the REIT with banking aspirations tied to a pending acquisition of retail banking branches of bankrupt Fremont General Corp., said Monday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it has been unloading agency mortgage-backed securities at a frenetic pace since the start of April, selling $1.5 billion [...]

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