November retail sales show holiday season gains

Commerce reported that November retail sales at $448.1 billion were up 0.2 percent compared to November-for its best showing since July-and up 1.4 percent annually, on the heels of 1.7 percent, 0.1 percent, and 0.2 percent, in October, September, and August, respectively.

Monday Morning Cup of Coffee: Will Fed raise interest rates in December?

It’s finally here. It’s the week of the December Federal Open Market Committee meeting. The question up for debate: Will the Federal Reserve interest rates? According to most sources, the answer is yes. Also, ever tried to explain what you do for a living to your friends? Make them what this Hollywood motion picture.

House follows Senate’s lead, passes STB Reauthorization Act

Railroad service issues and rates remain front and center, as has been the case in previous incarnations of this legislation. The bill is focused on addressing inefficiencies within the STB, which serves as the federal regulatory body responsible for economic oversight of the U.S. rail system, with regulatory jurisdiction over railroad rate reasonableness, mergers, line acquisitions, new rail-line construction, line abandonment, and other issues.

Ally Financial getting back into mortgage business

Two years after being completely driven from the mortgage business due to the losses suffered by its former subsidiaries, GMAC Mortgage and Residential Capital, also known as ResCap, Ally Financial is getting back into mortgages. Click the headline to read more.

Here's the current status of the top three housing markets

Although the buyer traffic index did improve, it is still below agent expectations as persistent issues with short supplies of quality inventory and buyer resistance to higher prices remain significant concerns. This is the latest update on the top markets in the nation based on single-family building permits.

ISM semiannual report’s ‘special questions’ focus on falling oil prices and strength of U.S. dollar

The December 2015 Semiannual Economic Forecast issued yesterday by the Institute for Supply Management took on two items that have been prevalent in addressing current trends in the form of: sharply lower oil prices the strength of the U.S. dollar. Each question was presented to the ISM’s manufacturing and non-manufacturing member respondents.

Retailer-Supplier Collaboration: Identifying and Eliminating Barriers to Improve Supply Chain Perfor

Everyone seems to agree that collaboration between retailers and suppliers promotes a leaner, more profitable supply chain for all. But the pace of collaborative initiatives has been slow.

$6 billion Fannie, Freddie bulk servicing portfolio available for sale

Buyers looking to get their hands on some Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage servicing rights have that opportunity, as a $6 billion bulk residential mortgage servicing rights portfolio that features loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is available for sale.

More ocean carrier consolidation looms as CGM makes offer to buy NOL

In a much-anticipated move, CMA CGM announced a pre-conditional voluntary general cash offer for Neptune Orient Lines (NOL).

Freddie Mac publishes single-family loan-level data for all fixed-rate mortgages

Freddie Mac announced Monday that it is making single-family loan-level data publicly available for all fixed-rate mortgages as part of an effort to provide investors with more information about its credit risk-sharing deals.

Resilience requires transparency

U.S. multinationals engaged in Pacific Rim commerce also appear to have a high threshold for risk, notes recent research done by Resilinc, a cloud provider of supply chain resilience and risk management intelligence and analytics

Trulia: 3 predictions for housing in 2016

With 2016 less than a month away, Trulia published a blog on what it predicts will happen in the housing market over the next year. One of these predictions is that buying will still be a more financially wise decision compared to renting.

November non-manufacturing activity still showing growth, reports ISM

The index ISM uses to measure non-manufacturing growth—known as the NMI—came in at 55.9 in November (a level of 50 or higher indicates growth), which was down 3.2 percent compared to October. The PMI is 1.4 percent below the 12-month average of 57.3.

HLP, Freddie Mac, NFL legend Tim Brown partner to help minority families become homeowners

HLP, Freddie Mac, the Hispanic Action Outreach Network, and NFL Hall of Famer Tim Brown announced a partnership designed to help low and moderate-income African-American and Hispanic families buy their own homes.

How Tracking/Managing Energy Consumption Drives Real Cost Savings

The spacious, expansive nature of the warehouse or distribution center (DC) makes it a prime candidate for managing energy consumption and cutting costs

Exclusive: Josh Rosner and Glen Corso on why it's time for true GSE reform

In an exclusive commentary, Graham Fisher & Co.'s Josh Rosner and Glen Corso, the executive director of the Community Mortgage Lenders of America, discuss why now is the right time for comprehensive reform to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae, and plot a roadmap for the future of the GSEs.

loanDepot closes first $150M securitization of personal loans

The online mortgage lender officially moved into marketplace lending on May 13, becoming the first national nonbank lender to offer both home and personal loans nationwide. Since then, loanDepot has funded more than $250 million in personal loans, leading to the company’s first $150 million securitization of unsecured personal loans.

Trailblazers: Tavant Technologies

Tavant adds flexibility to its clients’ business and technology initiatives by keeping their investments in large enterprise systems (such as an LOS) intact and providing a “surround and extend” strategy and infrastructure that allows them to provide unique business differentiators to their customer base.

Trailblazers: SecureView

Boarded houses advertise a property’s vacancy, increasing vandalism and other crimes. Seeing the neighborhood blight that resulted from these plywood-boarded properties inspired Robert Klein, founder of Safeguard Properties, to develop a new product that solved these problems: SecureView.

2015 Trailblazers: Nationwide Title Clearing

Nationwide Title Clearing's broad service offerings range from recording and title clearing services for loan originators to post-closing audits, mortgage assignment, pre-sale audits and payoff services — covering the entire lifecycle of a loan. The company has seen a stunning 350% growth in the last four years and can track and fulfill county document requirements in all 3600+ recording jurisdictions nationwide.

2015 Trailblazers: National Real Tax Tracking

National Real Tax Tracking provides lenders, servicers, investors and title companies with the information they need for research, due diligence and compliance. By functioning as an outsourced tax division, NRTT empowers companies to research, monitor and manage everything they need related to property tax status, in a compliant and transparent way.

2015 Trailblazers: Mason-McDuffie Mortgage Corp.

Mason-McDuffie utilizes the Kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement, which places a high value on each employee and empowers them to spot and eliminate waste. From a practical standpoint, it means that the company’s collaborative structure is focused on making changes, monitoring results and adjusting accordingly.

2015 Trailblazers: Global DMS

Global DMS has developed an appraisal work-flow engine — eTrac Enterprise — that gives users a single-source valuation management platform to centralize all aspects of the appraisal process. This work-flow engine eliminates the need for manual intervention within specified processes because all of the steps and notifications are automated.

2015 Trailblazers: Equifax

Today, many lenders verify an applicant’s employment and income themselves, often by having consumers provide W-2s and pay stubs. This is not only a time-intensive process that relies on consumers, but it also increases the risk to lenders due to a potential for fraud because the employer is removed from the process.

2015 Trailblazers: Black Knight Financial Services

To support lenders and their network of settlement agents with their efforts at TRID compliance, Black Knight’s Closing Insight solution offers online integrations with major title and settlement platforms to facilitate lenders’ efforts to generate the new closing disclosure forms and enable lenders and settlement agents to reconcile fees within mandated timelines.

2015 Trailblazers: Arch MI

With its commitment to real innovation, including Arch MI RateStar and Arch Mortgage Guaranty Company, Arch MI has proven itself to be the partner that can transform and expand lending horizons.

2015 Trailblazers: Alight Mortgage Lending

Alight Mortgage Lending helps answer key questions like: What happens if mortgage rates skyrocket? Will it be better to open a new branch this quarter or next? Is there enough cash to build franchise value by retaining servicing? Using Alight, lenders can make this kind of scenario-driven analysis a critical part of day-to-day business for all teams across their enterprise.

Company Spotlight: LenderLive

As a true end-to-end solutions provider, LenderLive specializes in enabling key functions for a lender’s organization including loan origination, document management and document preparation, settlement services, loan servicing, due diligence and operational compliance. Moreover, LenderLive’s expansion into loan subservicing comes at the right time for mortgage companies, banks and credit unions looking for help with subservicing. LenderLive offers these companies a complete subservicing solution enabling these lenders to benefit from LenderLive’s scale.

The next big thing in SFR: Lending to landlords

Tighter regulation and higher risk aversion — both to actual risk and to headline risk — in the world of mainstream lending mean that despite the opportunity available with SFR investors, traditional lenders have by and large not jumped on this opportunity. That leaves these nontraditional national lenders a bigger share of the pie in a market that in the past has been largely the domain of local and regional hard-money lenders.

Economies of scale: Why consolidation may be just what SFR needs

On the multi-borrower side, the potential for volume is massively larger than on the single-family side, but the challenge until now has always been on how to scale this side of the business.

Embracing the science of income analysis

Despite the ever-increasing pressures in this area, most lenders still approach income by leaving it up to the underwriter to pull everything together. If technology can improve processes in so many areas of mortgage banking, why can’t it add efficiency to one of the most traditional aspects of the loan process, income calculation?

What's driving mortgage lending behavior?

That lenders may be holding back a bit is not surprising as lessons from behavioral finance studies suggest that individuals tend to weight recent experience more than the past. Applied to the mortgage business and compounded by rising compliance costs, recent experience with heavy credit losses of the crisis could be dampening management enthusiasm for credit expansion in an otherwise expanding, albeit tepid economy.

5.8 million foreclosures, and counting

Over the past eight years, housing counselors and the mortgage servicing industry have learned a lot, and it’s our joint responsibility to avoid the mistakes of the past, to maintain momentum, and to create new pathways for homeowner-centric loss mitigation practices that have sustainable homeownership as the No. 1 objective.

Tech Innovator: Centric Technology Solutions refines the appraisal process

For appraisers, the platform’s embedded guidelines mean fewer revisions, so they can not only complete more valuations, but do so with greater clarity. New appraisers can be brought on board quickly with educational opportunities built into the platform, which could shorten the appraiser’s learning curve by 60% to 80%.

Hot Seat: Patrick Nackley of Superior Home Services

We don’t want servicers to get shorted on pricing, depreciation, being paid overhead and profit. If you are maximizing the value of each settlement and anticipating using that money to repair, you are reducing the incidents of corporate contribution.

2015 HW Vanguard Award winners

All of the sectors of the housing economy now — real estate, lending, servicing and investing — are navigating unchartered territory. The challenges are new and the processes scrutinized as never before. Against that backdrop, we at HousingWire thought it was appropriate to recognize the tremendous leadership within the mortgage space with our first annual HW Vanguard Awards. Companies in our business couldn’t have survived the crisis, or formed in this brave new world, without serious leadership.

Appraisal volume tumbles amid Thanksgiving holiday

Appraisal volume significantly tumbled after last week’s slight rise. However, according to Kevin Golden, director of analytics with a la mode, "This apparently dramatic drop is not something to be concerned about."

LenderLive adds Scott Banks as senior vice president of finance

In this newly created role, Banks will be responsible for overseeing the investor reporting, treasury and bank reconciliation functions, as well as the development of budgets, forecasts, financial reporting, and analyses to support new business initiatives and show return on investment, the company said.

Network Funding unveils several non-QM lending programs

Network Funding, a private residential mortgage lending company, announced a series of new lending programs designed to "help people achieve financing that wouldn’t typically qualify for a mortgage due to typical guideline restrictions."

Congress reaches highway deal without controversial use of Fannie, Freddie fees

Thanks to a landmark agreement between the Democrats and Republicans in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, it’s looking increasingly likely that the fees charged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to guarantee loans will not be used to fund new roads.

Genworth survey: Compliance with TRID still weighs heavily on housing industry

As the two-month anniversary of the implementation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Know Before You Owe mortgage disclosure rule approaches, concerns over complying with the TRID rules are still weighing heavily on mortgage industry professionals, a new survey showed.

[Report] The housing market can withstand a Fed interest rate hike

Despite some concerns that an interest rate hike could devastate the housing market, a new report from Capital Economics said that housing looks well placed to withstand a rate hike. However, there are more issues that the industry needs to overcome other than just rising interest rates.

HomeUnion expands again; begins lending to single-family rental investors

HomeUnion, an online real-estate investment management firm, is expanding from helping investors identify single-family rental properties to purchase to actually helping them buy the properties. HomeUnion announced Tuesday that it is launching a new division, HomeUnion Lending, which will focus on lending to single-family rental investors.

HW Vanguard Awards: Leadership has never been more important

We created the HW Vanguard Awards to highlight the leaders in every sector of housing who are forging a new path toward profitability and sustainability. We received a lot of outstanding nominations, but every one of the 27 executives we chose in this first year were clear winners.

CoreLogic: Home prices rise 6.8% in October

According to the latest Home Price Index from CoreLogic, home prices continued to post "healthy" gains in the month of October. And CoreLogic expects that prices are going to continue to trend in the same direction as we head into 2016.