Mortgage, Real Estate | featured news

Applications for home mortgages surged last week, racking up the biggest increase in four months on a flood of refinancing demand as interest rates remained low, an industry group said on Wednesday.

Mortgage industry employees are still signing documents they haven't read and using fake signatures more than eight months after big banks and mortgage companies promised to stop the illegal practices that led to a nationwide halt of home foreclosures.

Inma Rodriguez lost her job, and now that she's defaulted on her mortgage, she's about to lose her home. But the nightmare doesn't end there: Once creditors kick her out, she'll still need to pay back the money she borrowed to buy her house....

An initiative from the Obama administration is meant to allow eligible homeowners to postpone all or part of their mortgage payments for a year or more.

Bank of America Corp and JPMorgan Chase & Co have started modifying tens of thousands of mortgages where the banks deem the loans especially risky, even if the borrowers have not asked, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

JPMorgan Chase & Co has pushed out its head of home lending, David Lowman, who was sidelined in February after the bank racked up billions of dollars in losses on soured mortgages and became mired in litigation over a wave of foreclosures.

Proposed rules sparked by the financial industry meltdown could have the effect of shutting many lower-income buyers out of the mortgage market, critics say.

The nation's largest mortgage companies are operating on the assumption that they will have to pay as much as $20 billion to resolve claims of widespread foreclosure abuse, an amount four times what they had originally proposed, the top federal official overseeing the discussions told state officials Monday, according to people who participated in the conversation.

The nation’s biggest banks and mortgage lenders have amassed a glut of foreclosed homes that threatens to deepen the housing slump.

The number of American households behind on mortgage payments posted a substantial decline from year-earlier levels, but foreclosures remained near record highs in the first quarter.