Mortgages Blog

Few things in life are really fair. But one of the most overlooked stories in the U.S. foreclosure crisis may be the strikingly large, and at times grossly unfair, disparities in how homeowners are treated depending on where they live. Consider: Some states handle foreclosures mainly though the courts. Others use a nonjudicial process. Still

In trying to stimulate the housing market, two parts of the federal government are working at cross purposes. The Federal Reserve keeps flushing in an effort to get liquidity flowing through the pipes of the economy, while an agency called FHFA keeps clogging them. Yesterday the Fed announced another round of measures designed to depress

The Federal Reserve’s rate-setting committee meets today and tomorrow. Around 2:15 p.m. eastern time tomorrow, the Fed will issue its latest rate policy statement, and it will move markets. The prudent thing to do is lock your mortgage rate before tomorrow afternoon. It is quite possible that long-term interest rates will go down after the

A week ago, I was attending the Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual conference, in Atlanta. The dominant issue was regulation. Two years after we, the taxpayers, bailed them out with billions of dollars, the mortgage bankers want to be left alone to do as they please. As we continue to dig out of the mortgage-led real

This Halloween, the scariest haunted house on my block is the foreclosure. Actually, I have two of them down the street here in Florida. Nice homes, now shuttered, pools dry, slowly in decay. And yes, it scares me to ponder how these foreclosed homes might affect my home’s value. Add the recent foreclosure freeze to

Properties in some stage of foreclosure (loan default, scheduled for action or lender-owned), accounted for 24 percent of all U.S. home sales in the second quarter of 2010, according to the RealtyTrac online foreclosure information service. And that percentage might well have been higher had the homebuyer tax credit not goosed the sales volume. The

Q: What do you call someone who completes one semester of college, works for six years as a customer service representative for a company that sells window shades, and then shuffles papers for two years in a bank’s document execution department? A: You call her vice president of loan documentation for Wells Fargo Bank, N.A.

Nowadays, it takes six or more weeks for a consumer to get a mortgage, from application to closing. The lender takes more than a month to go through each borrower’s paperwork, making sure that all the documents are genuine and true. It took Bank of America two and a half weeks to confirm that the

Bank of America says it will resume foreclosures in at least 23 states, starting next week. BofA, the largest mortgage servicer, has suspended foreclosures nationwide as it reviews its processes for repossessing houses. In the 23 judicial foreclosure states, the bank is getting ready to resubmit affidavits in 102,000 foreclosure cases. In a statement, the

The average rate on the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage went up this week in Bankrate’s survey. Rates on other types of mortgages went down. Both ways, the movement was small. Overall, you could say that mortgage rates, on average, were about the same. On the 30-year fixed, the biggest banks tended to raise rates this week,