News

Sheriff Richard Jones of Butler County, Ohio, is refusing to evict homeowners or tenants in his jurisdiction who have been foreclosed on and have no other place to live. The sheriff sent a letter to Ohio Gov.

Vantium Capital Inc., a private equity fund that invests in undervalued mortgage assets, announced today that its specialty servicing unit, Acqura Loan Services, has begun offering electronic loan modifications, or e-mods, to delinquent borrowers in an effort to improve and accelerate borrower acceptance and reduce loan modification timelines.

Rising home sales, declining home prices, stricter loan underwriting standards, and the financial market meltdown all contributed to a turbulent year in California’s housing market, according to the California Association of Realtors (C.

Brookfield, Wisconsin-based Fiserv Inc., a provider of information technology services to the financial industry, today announced enhanced capabilities to its Home Retention Solutions offering – a system that helps financial institutions proactively identify and contact troubled borrowers with customized repayment solutions to try to keep them out of foreclosure.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) yesterday announced an expedited process that will help prevent a federal tax lien block on the refinancing of mortgages or the sale of a home by financially distressed homeowners.

The Federal Reserve yesterday slashed its benchmark federal funds rate – the overnight rate at which banks lend to each other – from 1 percent to a target range of 0 percent to 0.25 percent, the lowest rate on record.

The faltering American Insurance Group Inc. (AIG) said earlier this week that it has sold its portfolio of residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) to a new financing entity backed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which was created in early October as part of the federal government’s bailout of the giant insurer.

Columbia, Maryland-based CMSI Group Inc., a company that helps financial institutions mitigate credit risk, recently announced the first of two software applications for assessing the underlying loss risk of a lender’s loan portfolio.

All in all, residential properties in the United States are set to lose well over $2 trillion in value by the end of 2008, according to a report released Monday by Zillow.com. Home values declined 8.4 percent, losing $1.

ForeclosureRadar, an online company that tracks California foreclosures and provides daily auction updates, issued its California Foreclosure Report for November 2008 today. Despite the clear impact that California State Senate Bill 1137 had on stemming foreclosure activity in September and October, November saw significant increases across all stages of the foreclosure process, the company said.