Rates are about even today after rising yesterday, and 30yr rates are about 4.875%. Yesterday, December’s New Home Sales showed a 17.5% increase in single-family home sales (way more than 3.1% expected), the Fed said the economy is still struggling, and there was a well-received 5-yr Treasury auction. The Fed announcement should have offset the [...]

2011 Mortgage Rate Outlook The Mortgage Bankers Association released their mortgage rate predictions yesterday. They expect rates on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage will average 4.4% in the fourth quarter of 2010, increasing to a 4.7% average in the first quarter of 2011, and climbing to 5.1% by the end of next year. Most late-2009, early-2010 [...]

Bond Bubble? WSJ has the latest bond bubble talk, saying bond markets are growing riskier as investors seeking steady returns bid up prices and ignore some early warning signs similar to those that flashed during the credit bubble. Last week, prices on high-yield, or junk, bonds hit their highest level since 2007, nearly double their [...]

Guns & Mortgages This story speaks for itself, here’s the link and the epic lead paragraph below: Prosecutors: Mortgage Worker Got Drunk, Shot Computer Server

Short Sales Take 6-13 Months A study put out by Deutsche Bank ranked GMAC ranked as the top servicer among all prime mortgage servicers based on short sale timelines – six months! The investment bank’s survey showed that a short sale generated a higher recovery than an REO sale. For “prime” short sales, GMAC was [...]

Rates Up On New Home Sales & Durable Goods Numbers Today we had Durable Goods (very volatile) and a big New Home Sales number. Durable Goods were expected to be +.3% for March and originally reported as +.5% in February, the third consecutive monthly increase (although most of the gain in February’s number was due [...]

Does A Loan Originator Have To Buy Back A Bad Loan Even After It’s Modified? Yesterday I mentioned the question about whether or not modified loans could still be forced back to the seller for buybacks. Freddie Mac does indeed say that the seller would still need to buy it back after a modification. At [...]

Treasury Auctions Weigh on Markets Yesterday’s $42 billion 5-yr auction did not go well. It goes back to the “What if we held an auction and nobody bid?” Indirect bids, which in the past indicated a level of interest from foreign entities but in the last year became a little convoluted, have been on a [...]

ARMs Only 3% Of Total Agency Loans In 2009 An annual report on the ARM market published by Freddie Mac shows adjustable-rate mortgages accounted for just 3 percent of all conventional home purchase loans in 2009. That’s the smallest percentage for ARMs since at least 1982.

Treasury’s Unlimited Fannie/Freddie Backing Regardless of whether or not it is good or bad for our industry, or the debate about the timing of the announcement, on Christmas Eve the U.S. Treasury agreed to provide Fannie & Freddie unlimited capital as needed over the next three years. It is an effort to reassure the investors [...]