While housing analysts revel in numbers about home prices and construction starts, I have been trying to focus on the realities of an unhealthy market, with hedge fund house-flippers and shadow inventory driving the so-called “recovery” more than anything fundamental. Gretchen Morgenson takes up the other aspect of this, the fact that the legal wrangling [...]

Katherine Porter, the monitor tasked with specific oversight for California’s foreclosure fraud settlement, says what most of us could have suspected: the servicers are dragging their feet on compliance. The California monitor of the $25 billion national mortgage servicing settlement received roughly 1,100 complaints in the last month from borrowers reporting a slow uptake to [...]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has proposed new rules for the mortgage servicing industry, which include a requirement that servicers must make a decision on any mortgage relief applicant within 30 days, and must not begin foreclosure proceedings until completing that process. Under the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposal, loan servicers would be required to [...]

While everyone celebrates the great housing recovery, it’s worth pointing out that servicers continue to rip off their customers. The servicer model simply relies on fraud and abuse, and since there has been little in the way of meaningful change for their industry, of course they’re still delivering that same level of abusive service. The [...]

Who better to tell us how to “get housing right” than the head of Wells Fargo Home Loans! Surely Mike Heid would have no conflicts of interest and would solely have the benefit of the homeowner in mind. • In the short-term, I believe it is critical to end uncertainty about rights and responsibilities between [...]

Adding to its enforcement actions, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken a California company to court over a loan modification fraud scheme. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has filed its first ever civil enforcement action in federal court, charging a Los Angeles law firm of duping distressed homeowners into paying high upfront fees with [...]

FHFA leader Ed DeMarco has indefinitely put on hold the question of whether he will allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to offer principal reductions to delinquent underwater borrowers. He’s actually said nothing about it publicly since April. But Nick Timiraos leaks out the details of a new study that shows the benefits of principal [...]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a hotline for complaints, as well as a process to lodge complaints at their website. They have begun to release those complaint reports, protecting the identity of the consumer but providing an understanding of where the trouble in the financial system lies with respect to those consumers. Here’s a [...]

The Federal Housing Finance Agency engaged in a little back-patting yesterday for improved HARP figures, which they say are a direct result of their changes to the system to allow for more underwater borrowers to take advantage of low refinancing rates. The truth is a little murkier. For the first five months of 2012, more [...]

Analysts have shown a propensity to announce that the country has hit a bottom on housing, throwing a host of facts and figures together to prove it. Many of these analysts benefit financially from the appearance of a housing recovery, and certainly banks benefit greatly as well. Earnings reports from JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo [...]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s greatest challenge over the next year or so is to fundamentally reshape the mortgage market, which is horribly broken and characterized almost entirely by fraud at the moment. The various settlements and consent orders have not changed this for the better, by the way. Take a look at this checklist [...]