Mortgages Blog

Victims of mortgage scams have a new cop on the beat in California. The U.S. Department of Justice and California Attorney General’s office have teamed up to create a joint mortgage fraud task force of 25 attorneys and investigators who will monitor, investigate and prosecute both civil and criminal mortgage-related scams and frauds in the

Why were you turned down for a HAMP modification? That’s the question that the U.S. Treasury aims to answer with an online calculator that was posted yesterday. It also can help answer the question: Will I be approved for a HAMP mod? The calculator can be found at the dreadful URL CheckMyNPV.com. For search engine

Following on the heels of its overhaul of credit card disclosures announced in March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, last week launched its “Know Before You Owe” project, a similar attempt to streamline and clarify government-required mortgage disclosures. “Buying a home is one of the biggest financial decisions most Americans will ever make.

Mortgage loan disclosure forms are notoriously complicated and difficult for borrowers to understand, despite the fact that these miserable pieces of paper have been debated, analyzed, focus-grouped, revised and reimagined to the “nth” degree in recent years. Still, the newly minted federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is taking another run at the problem, trying to

The U.S. mortgage market appears to be on the mend. Except, that is, for the usual hot spots, where loan delinquencies and foreclosures remain so elevated they render the national statistics “somewhat meaningless.” That’s according to the latest survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington, D.C., and commentary by MBA Chief Economist Jay Brinkmann.

Mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures have declined in the first quarter, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The percentage of loans that were delinquent for 90 days or more dropped half a percentage point to 8.1 percent in the first three months of the year, compared to the fourth quarter of 2010. The share of mortgages

The foreclosure crisis is far from over and the situation could worsen if home prices continue to decline, according to data from a housing and mortgage trends report released by the real estate and financial information firm CoreLogic. Nearly one in four borrowers, or 11 million people, owes more on their mortgage than what their

There is no question the lack of regulatory oversight played a huge role in the collapse of the mortgage and housing markets. Yet, the concept of creating a more efficient system to help protect consumers’ interest against the predatory lending practices that contributed to this crisis seems to be viewed as absurd by some banks

A new survey has found that homeowners continue to report considerable financial distress. Nearly 23 percent of those polled in a first-quarter Fannie Mae housing survey who said they had a mortgage also said they owed more than the value of their home. Of those underwater borrowers, 46 percent felt stressed about their ability to

Have too many foreclosed properties? Why not give them away? That’s what Bank of America plans to do with as many as 150 vacant and abandoned properties in and around Chicago through a new “collaboration” with the city that’s intended to address the problem of abandoned properties. “Unfortunately,” BofA said in a statement, “many homeowners