Existing-home sales eased in March from inventory constraints, which continued to pressure home prices, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Total existing-home sales, which are completed transactions that include single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, declined 0.6 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.92 million in March from a downwardly revised 4.95 million in February, but remain 10.3 percent higher than the 4.46 million-unit pace in March 2012. Sales have been above year-ago levels for 21 consecutive months, while prices show Click to continue

Loss severities for U.S. RMBS will continue their slow decline this year due in part to the increased use of short sales, according to Fitch Ratings in its latest mortgage market index. Fitch's Loss Severity Index improved to 64.2 percent for the first quarter of 2013, down from 67.5 percent in the first quarter of 2012. Drivers of the improved loss severity rate include increased short sale percentages, fewer servicer advances on missed payments, and increased home prices.Click to continue

With nearly 25 percent of Ohio homeowners underwater on their mortgages, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) unveiled a plan to improve the housing market by addressing short sale transactions. Short sales are real estate transactions that must be approved by the bank because the seller owes more on his/her mortgage than the proposed sale price.Click to continue

The system used by the American credit reporting industry to report the history of consumer payments to creditors to the national credit repositories has a serious flaw, according to some members of the mortgage industry. This flaw is the lack of a specific code for short sale mortgage transactions. With the current mortgage climate of millions of short sale consumers needing properly documented accounts of their previous mortgage problem so they can re-enter the housing market, this problem is reaching epidemic proportions in some of the hardest hit regions of the country.Click to continue

McGeough Lamacchia Realty reports that in an effort to streamline the company and become more profitable, Bank of America is selling off its mortgages to servicers like Seterus, Greentree, Resurgent, SPS and RCS. In January of this year, Bank of America announced that it signed agreements to sell the servicing rights on two million residential mortgage loans totaling approximately $306 billion, a percentage of which are already in the process of a short sale. The transfers of servicing rights are scheduled to occur in stages over the course of 2013.Click to continue

Lender Processing Services Inc. (LPS) has released its latest LPS Home Price Index (HPI) report, based on December 2012 residential real estate transactions. The LPS HPI combines the company’s extensive property and loan-level databases to produce a repeat sales analysis of home prices as of their transaction dates every month for each of more than 15,500 U.S. ZIP codes. The LPS HPI represents the price of non-distressed sales by taking into account price discounts for real estate-owned (REO) and short sales.Click to continue

CoreLogic has released its National Foreclosure Report, which provides data on completed U.S. foreclosures and the overall foreclosure inventory. According to CoreLogic, there were 55,000 completed foreclosures in the U.S. in November 2012, down from 72,000 in November 2011, a year-over-year decrease of 23 percent. On a month-over-month basis, completed foreclosures fell from 59,000 in October 2012 to the current 55,000, a decrease of six percent.Click to continue

Existing-home sales continued to improve in November with low inventory supply pressuring home prices, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Total existing-home sales, which are completed transactions that include single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, rose 5.9 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.04 million in November from a downwardly revised 4.76 million in October, and are 14.5 percent higher than the 4.40 million-unit pace in November 2011.Click to continue

Carrington Property Services LLC has announced the introduction of the Carrington Property Network (CPN), an exclusive national network of leading residential real estate brokerage firms. Carrington will assist these firms to increase their business in two ways: by facilitating their participation in the distressed property market, and by enabling them to work with institutional real estate investors.Click to continue

September existing-home sales declined modestly, but inventory continued to tighten and the national median home price recorded its seventh back-to-back monthly increase from a year earlier, according to the latest figures from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Total existing-home sales, which are completed transactions that include single-family homes, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops, fell 1.7 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.75 million in September from an upwardly revised 4.83 million in August, but are 11 percent above the 4.28 million-unit pace in SepClick to continue