October 2010

The WSJ has an article that does a great job of qualifying the impact of what the foreclosure halt will do to the traditional cash waterfall priority schedule inherent in every MBS deal. To wit: junior bondholders will rejoice as [...]

FORBES – Ally Financial, JPMorganChase and Bank Of America are ordered to review foreclosures.

HAYWARD — A Fremont woman delayed entering a plea Monday afternoon in the Hayward Hall of Justice to felony charges stemming from a scam in which she and a colleague are suspected of having targeted Spanish-speaking as well as Southeast [...]

After teasing for much of the summer that it might be lessening, the foreclosure crisis reasserted itself in September, setting a one-month record for filings in Wisconsin. A preliminary count by Madison-based ForeclosureAlarm.com shows there were 2,942 foreclosure filings, up [...]

On Florida’s west coast, where the housing bust has flooded courts with foreclosure filings, the chief judge of the 6th  Judicial Circuit has little sympathy for lenders who have routinely submitted flawed and possibly fraudulent foreclosure cases. J. Thomas McGrady, [...]

The latest Orange County home inventory report from Steve Thomas Altera Real Estate as of September 30 says the supply of homes for sale fell by 88 to 11,804 — a small dip but the first drop of the year! [...]

As some of the nation’s largest lenders have conceded that their foreclosure procedures may have been improperly handled, lawsuits have revealed myriad missteps in crucial documents, Gretchen Morgenson writes in The New York Times.

Image via Wikipedia Some of the biggest names in commercial real estate came to Georgetown University‘s McDonough School of Business this week to give their assessment of where their industry stands after the worst bust since the Great Depression. The [...]

NEW YORK (TheStreet) — Investigations into foreclosures of home lenders such as JPMorgan Chase ( JPM) and Ally Financial should not affect the title insurance business, but the market is punishing the stocks nonetheless. More on JPM Title insurers’ stock [...]

Citigroup Inc. and Ally Financial Inc. units were sued by homeowners in Kentucky for allegedly conspiring with Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. to falsely foreclose on loans. The lawsuit, filed as a civil-racketeering class action on behalf of all Kentucky [...]

There wasn’t much fanfare, and it literally happened in the cover of night, but sometime after midnight Thursday morning, the U.S. Congress passed an extension of the increased Fannie/Freddie/FHA loan limits for high cost housing markets to a maximum $729,750. [...]

If you are thinking about buying a foreclosed home, you may want to hold off. In the paper on Friday, David Streitfeld writes about how two major lenders — JPMorgan Chase and GMAC — have acknowledged legal missteps in processing [...]

When Tom and Lola Kern applied for a mortgage modification last November, it seemed they were being given a lifeline that would allow them to keep their house. Eight months later that lifeline was turning into a noose. Because despite [...]

CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker reports they came to NACA’s Save the Dream tour desperate for help – just like 10,000 others who streamed through the L.A. Convention Center, some even sleeping overnight. NACA, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, [...]

“Even if a court sets aside a foreclosure due to a defect in documentation the foreclosing lender would be required to return to our insureds all funds obtained from them, resulting in no loss under the title insurance policy,” Fidelity [...]

(Reuters) – A Maine state court judge reprimanded GMAC mortgage over its foreclosure practices and concluded that it submitted a company official’s affidavit to support a foreclosure “in bad faith.”

“Why don’t banks modify more loans?” asks why, three years into the crisis and despite a big government program and lots of media buzz, mortgage modification remains such an exceptional event. The author, Marilyn Lewis of MSN Money, gives, somewhat [...]

Image by Getty Images via @daylife U.S. courts are clogged with a record number of foreclosures. Next, they may be jammed with suits contesting property rights as procedural mistakes in those cases cloud titles establishing ownership. “Defective documentation has created [...]