Santander Bank is undertaking a strategy to focus on markets it believes will drive growth in the future, and part of that strategy apparently includes selling off some of its bank branches. The company announced Monday it is selling 14 branches in Pennsylvania to First Commonwealth Bank.

Following a path previously laid out by the likes of Zillow and Redfin, and taking a page out of the playbook of Opendoor, Offerpad, and others, Keller Williams is about to start buying and selling houses. Next month, Keller Williams will launch an iBuyer offering, which it is calling “Keller Offers.”

Prosper, a longtime player in the personal lending space, announced plans in November to enter the mortgage arena with a digital HELOC product that promised to disrupt home equity lending. But there's a chance these plans could be put on hold. The SEC announced Friday that Prosper has agreed to pay a $3 million fine to settle charges that it misled to investors by reporting inflated returns.

Ginnie Mae has launched a new securitization channel for reverse mortgage-backed securities. Now, investors in the HECM mortgage-backed securities market can participate in Ginnie’s new Platinum HMBS program, which reduces the administrative costs of holding multiple and smaller HMBS securities and promises to bring more liquidity to the market.

Ally Financial, which all but exited the mortgage business back in 2012, got back into mortgages in earnest in 2016. Now, Ally is taking its mortgage business to the next level by going digital with help from Better.com (formerly known as Better Mortgage). Ally and Better announced Thursday that the companies are partnering to launch a digital mortgage platform for Ally.

Freddie Mac announced Wednesday it closed a Low-Income Housing Tax Credit fund with CAHEC and initiated several investments within the fund, totaling $50 million, for affordable rental housing in the Middle Appalachia area of the U.S.

In April 2011, Ellie Mae’s IPO launched at $6 per share. Yesterday, the stock closed at nearly $100 per share. Now, the good times are over, as Ellie Mae is now being removed from the NYSE.

It's official: The era of unusually affordable housing has ended. Well, according to a recent Moody's Investors Services analysis. The organization claims that America's housing affordability has returned to average historical levels, therefore impacting credit quality across numerous housing-related sectors.

Back in the Wild, Wild West era of mortgage lending before the housing crisis, NINJA loans (loans given to borrowers with no income, no job, and no assets required) became quite the rage. NINJA loans have disappeared from the market, likely never to be seen again, but one lender is about to bring back a similar ghost of the mortgage market’s past: the NINA loan.

Homebuilder confidence in the market for new single-family homes rose in April as so-called buyer traffic increased to new developments. The index measuring current sales conditions rose to 69 points from 68, while buyer traffic jumped to 47 from 44. Expectations for the next six months fell to 71 from 72.