I’m seeing way too many stories about this boomlet of investors buying up foreclosed properties to resell as rental units that don’t challenge the basic assumptions. They take a detached view of a phenomenon once limited to local investors that has now branched out into hedge funds and capital management firms. And they’re not questioning [...]

Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase, showing no ill effects from a foreclosure fraud settlement that was supposed to penalize them for fraudulent misconduct, both announced robust earnings gains today. Matt Stoller has a good look inside the numbers. But I was intrigued by the fact that both banks attributed stronger mortgage lending numbers for their [...]

The LA Times had the goods on the Treasury Department’s Hardest Hit Fund a month ago, showing that in California, the fund only paid out 2% of its allotment in the first 16 months. But that was about one state’s implementation of the program. Maybe other states did better. Well, the answer is no. An [...]

We’ve heard stories for the past couple weeks about how banks are more keen to maintain properties in more affluent areas than in minority neighborhoods. Now, one fair housing group is trying to do something about that. The National Fair Housing Alliance filed a federal housing discrimination complaint against Wells Fargo to get the bank [...]

Ed DeMarco, the Acting Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency for the past three years, will deliver a speech today at the Brookings Institution that leans in the direction of allowing principal reduction on Fannie and Freddie-backed loans in certain cases. This is definitely a crack in the otherwise rigid objection to principal reduction [...]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has begun its rulemaking process for mortgage servicing, starting with a description of the rules they will consider. The formal proposal of servicing rules will come this summer, and the final rules will get promulgated in January 2013. This would supersede the mortgage servicing standards from the foreclosure fraud settlement, [...]

Mark Zandi now predicts that the job market will come back at a much stronger clip than he previously expected, with the jobless rate under 8% by the end of 2012 and under 7% by the end of 2013. Zandi is the guy who predicted a bottom in housing prices in 2008, 2009, 2010 and [...]

Kaid Benfield from the Natural Resources Defense Council takes a look on the bright side in regards to the foreclosure crisis, postulating that it will sound the death knell for exurban communities and sprawl: The subject of the Great Recession came up, and I volunteered that I thought the persistent economic slump had hurt both [...]

Pursuant to my last post, a substantial part of the push to fire Ed DeMarco or force him to engage in principal reductions comes from the direct action bank accountability groups that have been the most aggressive and least connected to the “extend and pretend” idea. So even though writing down GSE loans without fully [...]

In a speech yesterday, Acting Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Ed DeMarco, said that he would make a new determination on the efficacy of principal reduction for underwater borrowers in Fannie and Freddie-backed loans by the end of this month. The GSEs own or guarantee $5 trillion worth of home mortgages, a substantial [...]

We’ve seen a few of these stories about a surge of investors picking up foreclosed homes cheap and converting them into rental properties, and the New York Times follows suit today. In a way this is an old story. Foreclosed or abandoned homes are always fixer-upper candidates, and investors have been scooping them up for [...]