News

It’s a terrible time for homebuyers. Mortgage rates for a 30-year fixed-rate loan are hovering around 7% levels and still-high home prices are slashing purchasing power. What helped Erica Davis, a loan originator at Guild Mortgage, in the current high-rate

Homebuilders must be feeling some whiplash, as new single-family home sales continued to yo-yo in October. After rebounding in August from a drop in July only to fall again in September, new home sales were back up in October, according

The current market downturn for mortgage lenders may be shorter than the previous cycles, mainly due to the recent rounds of workforce layoffs imposed by nonbanks. “While it is true that many nonbanks entered this downturn with a large war

Recent declines in mortgage rates, which are due to a slowdown in inflation growth, have been enough to convince some borrowers to apply for new home loans, according to recent data on mortgage applications.  However, there are still forces pushing

Mortgage rates are changing every day – and those changes can have big effects on borrowers. Over the last year, it seems that most of those changes have taken an upward trajectory, but there are times that monitoring mortgage rates

With mortgage rates down nearly 50 basis points from the recent peak about a month ago, borrower demand picked up again this week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). The market composite index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, rose

Prepayment activity fell to another record low in October amid mortgage rates topping 7% and refis drying up. Black Knight expects that the steep declines in rate lock volume and seasonality factors point to further declines in prepayment activity. Prepayment

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Marcia Fudge will be the first sitting HUD secretary to visit Japan when she arrives in Tokyo next week. According to an announcement, Tokyo’s Governor Yuriko Koike will hold a joint

Movement Mortgage CEO Casey Crawford and President Mike Brennan. Movement Mortgage’s deal to acquire top indie retail lender Mortgage Network marks a shift in the South Carolina-based company’s strategy. “Over the years, we’ve been more focused on organic growth, one

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported today on two trends in existing home sales that we have seen for many months now: sales are declining while total inventory data has fallen directly for the three straight months. On a

Black Knight agreed to sell its TitlePoint business unit to former parent company Fidelity National Financial for $225 million in cash. A sale of TitlePoint is expected ahead of Black Knight’s planned blockbuster acquisition by Intercontinental Exchange, Inc.  TitlePoint enables

Proptech firm Rhino will be buying the technology and assets of Deposify, a cash security deposit management technology platform, to launch an end-to-end deposit management and compliance platform. The platform, which is planned to launch after the transaction closes this

Don’t be fooled by last week’s mortgage rate collapse.  A combination of elevated mortgage rates, sluggish home sales and inflation continue to plague the housing market workforce, with numerous mortgage lenders and real estate startups shedding employees. “The U.S. housing

On Aug. 31, 2022, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced that it would conduct a comprehensive review of the Federal Home Loan Bank (FHLB) system. This article addresses two legal issues relevant to the review: FHFA’s statutory authority to

The third quarter used to be historically the strongest of the year for independent mortgage banks (IMBs) and mortgage subsidiaries of chartered banks.  At least until 2022.  On the origination side, these companies’ costs exceeded $11,000 per loan for the

The housing recession was in full swing in October. Existing home sales last month declined 5.9% from September to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.43 million in October, and were down 28.4% year over year. That’s the largest year