Secondary Market
By Carrie Bay | 08/30/2010
Freddie Mac released the results of its second quarter Conventional Mortgage Home Price Index (CMHPI) Monday. The index measures property values based on home loans originated in Q2 and purchased by Freddie and its sibling mortgage financier Fannie Mae.
The CMHPI Purchase-Only Series for the United States registered a 3.1 percent increase in the second quarter relative to the first quarter. For the first time since the second quarter of 2009, prices rose in all nine Census divisions.
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By Heather Hill Cernoch | 08/30/2010
Accounting firms Eisner LLP and Amper, Politziner & Mattia, LLP, recently merged to create EisnerAmper LLC's real estate group, doubling the size of the firm's real estate practice. The New York-based firm is now the largest non-Big 4 firm in the greater New York metropolitan region and the 14th largest in the nation. The company now offers developers, property owners and managers, and others in the industry a broader array of professional services.
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By Carrie Bay | 08/30/2010
Fannie Mae is implementing a new policy this week regarding home appraisals. Beginning Wednesday, lenders will be prohibited from making changes to appraisers' valuations - a practice that has become more widespread and is commonly referred to as "appraisal cutting."
Fannie officials say they have identified cases where the lender reduced the opinion of market value in the appraisal report based upon underwriter judgment or automated valuation models, prompting the GSE to place a ban on so-called appraisal cutting.
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By Carrie Bay | 08/27/2010
The percentage of home loans 90 or more days past due held by the nation's two largest mortgage companies has declined yet again.
Fannie Mae's single-family serious delinquency rate has fallen to 4.99 percent. It's the fourth straight month that Fannie has reported a decline. Freddie Mac's serious delinquencies dropped to 3.89 percent, the fourth decrease in five months. The reciprocated declines seem a welcome herald, but researchers say they're merely the consequence of an increase in GSE foreclosures.
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By Carrie Bay | 08/27/2010
Industry experts and regulators have been issuing dire warnings for months that the more than $1 trillion in commercial mortgages coming due over the next couple of years could be a hurdle that the real estate sector - and the entire national economy, for that matter - can't clear. But the research firm Trepp LLC says it's seeing a strong increase in the number of loans within commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) that are being paid off in full at maturity. Fifty percent were paid off in July, the most since December 2008.
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By Carrie Bay | 08/26/2010
The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) has released its mid-year ranking of commercial and multifamily mortgage servicers. Wells Fargo tops the list, with 40,292 loans worth $462.8 billion in its commercial/multifamily servicing portfolio. Also among the top five are PNC's Midland Loan Services, Berkadia, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and KeyBank Real Estate Capital.
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By Heather Hill Cernoch | 08/25/2010
Holliday Fenoglio Fowler, L.P. (HFF), a provider of commercial real estate and capital markets services, announced this week that Christopher Simon is the company's new managing director of its debt placement group. A 13-year veteran of commercial real estate, Simon's new role will focus on originating debt, equity, and structured finance transactions throughout the western United States.
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By Carrie Bay | 08/24/2010
Fitch Ratings has upgraded the individual and preferred stock ratings of Bank of America. But the agency says the upgrades are tempered by the bank's high level of nonperforming loans and the likelihood of large volumes of mortgage repurchase requests from the GSEs and other secondary market investors, largely because of the loans the bank inherited from its Countrywide acquisition. Fitch also expressed concern about BofA's exposure to home equity loans, especially those with loan-to-value ratios above 100 percent.
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By Heather Hill Cernoch | 08/24/2010
The Arizona Superior Court issued a ruling this month that allows San Diego-based receivership and loan recovery specialist Trigild to sell seven Arizona apartment complexes to Standard Portfolio for $123 million. The 2,759-unit portfolio was abandoned last year by the investment firm Bethany Group and placed into receivership in March 2009. The court's ruling allows the properties to be sold without requiring the lender to foreclose prior to the sale.
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By Carrie Bay | 08/20/2010
Members of the U.S. House of Representatives are calling on President Obama and the GSEs' regulator to "use all of [their] powers to recover money" from companies that shifted losses on to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
They say legal action should be used to recoup funds from the underwriters of faulty mortgages and the issuers of underwater securities that have saddled Fannie and Freddie with hundreds of billions of dollars in bad loans and cost taxpayers almost $150 billion to date.
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