Mortgages Blog

Borrowers who can’t make their mortgage payments may wonder why lenders are loathe to accept less in lieu of foreclosure. The reasons can be found in a recent Congressional oversight panel report about the Treasury’s Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP. The report focuses on HAMP, but much of the information is equally applicable to non-HAMP

It hardly requires a crystal ball to foretell that this sparkling New Year will soon be sullied by the ongoing mortgage mess. Joining last year’s headline-grabbing robosigners and rocket dockets will be this year’s new players: the title insurance companies. As New York Times columnist Ron Lieber recently wrote, title insurance companies will likely be

It’s a common complaint of struggling homeowners that mortgage loan servicers sometimes initiate a foreclosure while they are trying to get a loan modification. Lenders defend this two-track system as a necessary way to begin the long foreclosures process in case a loan modification isn’t appropriate or viable for that homeowner. Consumer groups and consumer

Like a rollicking round of Whack-a-Mole, problematic participants in our national foreclosure mess just keep popping up. We’ve been wailing on subprime lenders for two or three years now, followed by foreclosure mills and robosigners and robojudges and rocket dockets. Comes now a new mortgage mole that at least one expert claims deserves a whack:

“Failure” may be too harsh a word to describe the shortcomings of the U.S. Treasury’s Home Affordable Modification Program, but HAMP hasn’t exactly been an unqualified success either, judging by the Executive Summary of a 192-page report issued Dec. 14 by a Congressional oversight panel. Here are three snippets, quoting directly from the report: •

Mortgage rates hit 5 percent for the first time since May, in this week’s Bankrate.com rate survey. Read Marcie Geffner’s story to find out why. Actually, we can’t know for sure why rates have risen so much, so quickly. How quickly? Six weeks ago, the 30-year fixed was 4.42 percent, the lowest it’s ever been

This won’t come as a shock to you, but I was wrong in last week’s Rate Trend Index, when I predicted that mortgage rates would fall in the coming week. “When mortgage rates move up or down in big steps, they usually overshoot,” I wrote. “That’s why I believe this jump in mortgage rates will

I spent Sunday in a self-congratulatory mood, as I reveled in the idiocy of other people. Smugness feels good. If you were designing a stadium in Minneapolis, would you make sure it could withstand a 17-inch snowfall? Of course you would. Heavy snowfalls in Minneapolis are predictable. So why did the Metrodome’s architects design an

Mortgage rates hit a high last seen in early June in this week’s Bankrate.com survey. Marcie Geffner investigates why. The 30-year fixed has gone up almost half a percentage point in five weeks. I don’t think I’ve seen a complete and convincing explanation for why mortgage rates have risen so quickly. Geffner mentions the Fed’s

Did you hear the good news? Robogate is over. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac gave real estate agents the green light last week to go ahead and resume selling foreclosed homes after declaring a brief time-out to investigate some, um, irregularities on the documentation front. And so, casually, perhaps wistfully, we bid adieu to the