About 150 attendees logged into FNC’s Dodd-Frank webinar last week. FNC general counsel Neil Olson and executive vice president of corporate development David Work provided an overview of the new law’s 2,319 pages. First and foremost, the new act has 16 titles and creates 12 new federal regulatory agencies which will be established in the next months. The regulatory agencies include the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Title X), the largest and most broad ranging of the new regulatory

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The entire nation continues to watch Louisiana,The Pelican State, as it deals with the disaster off the gulf coast.

While many discuss the impact to the gulf coast, no one will be able to effectively predict the true impact on Louisiana housing prices or the housing market for quite some time.

Part of evaluating impact would be to evaluate the housing market prior to the gulf oil crisis. If we take a step back and review the activity from November 2009 through May 2010,

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Every silver lining in the mortgage industry is linked to a big, fat, dark cloud. Fannie Mae just reported that its rate of serious delinquencies for single-family homes dropped to 5.15% in June. Fannie Mae's total business was more than $3.21 trillion at the end of June. Now for that leaden cloud; 75% of the nation’s biggest metropolitan posted year-over-year increases in foreclosure activity, according to Mortgage Orb. Florida, California, Nevada and Arizona racked up the highest

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The Appraisal Institute applauded the U.S. Senate for passing a sweeping financial regulatory reform bill that includes the first modernization of real estate appraisal regulations in more than 20 years. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (HR 4173) is the first overhaul of appraisal regulations since the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) was enacted in 1989.

President Barack Obama is expected to sign it into law. “This

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Two reports rolled out this weekend estimating the loss in property values. The median price for a Gulf Coast home was $173,100 in April before the disaster and an acre of land was valued at $3 million.

Costar Group estimates the oil spill may cost $4.3 billion in property values along the 600 miles from Louisiana’s petrol-streaked beaches to Clearwater on Florida’s central Gulf Coast. But that estimate may already be a lowball; tar balls have been reported in Key West, about 242

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Recently, several banks conducted research linking unemployment to foreclosure. The response most Americans may have is, “Well, duh.” But the point the banks were making is, subprime loans are no longer the reason most Americans cannot afford their mortgages; losing a job is.

At the REO Expo in Dallas yesterday, RealtyTrac explained the math. For every one to six Americans who lose their jobs, there will be one foreclosure. Being unemployed, not being underwater, is what puts a home

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For decades, gorgeous, adrenaline-soaked South Beach has been lined with stratospherically priced luxury condos that no one who worked in the neighborhood's restaurants, stores, groceries or parking lots could afford to buy or rent. When the real estate bubble exploded, those condos became white elephants. Now, the Miami Beach Community Development Corp., a public housing agency, is buying the condos at cut-rate prices and renting them to the working- class Miamians who keep South Beach

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In a provocative interview with Fortune magazine, economist Robert Shiller (father of the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price indices) advised Americans not to regard real estate as a stellar investment unless they had golden guts, luck and the money to invest in glamour capitals like San Francisco and Manhattan.

He suggested Japan as a case study. "After Japan's 1980s bubble, prices fell for 15 consecutive years in that country's largest cities, and lost almost two thirds of their

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Grab a mug of Bosco, think Avocado Fiesta and Mellow Yellow thoughts and imagine a place where nothing bad happens: the Brady Bunch house. In the 1970s, there was no splattered real estate bubble. The Bradys romped through their enormous split level house, never worrying about the mortgage.

But how would the Bunch survive in tough 2010? Suppose architect Mike Brady had to sell the house because the recession bit into his work. The Brady Bunch home is a real house on 11222 Dilling

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What makes a city’s housing market a hopeless case? According to Business Insider, it takes a witches’ brew of rocketing unemployment, plunging property values and no white knights (such as a huge company ready to inject jobs and cash into the town) anywhere in sight. Crunching numbers from the National Association of Realtors into local unemployment statistics, the Business Insider came up with this list of 13 cities where housing values will never recover. Do you agree

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CNN is reporting that BP has, as of yesterday, paid a total of "$75,725 to start settling some of the 446 claims against it for lost income on area rental properties. BP disbursed another $5,000 to cover real-estate sales losses.”

That amount is tiny compared to the more than $40 million in damages BP has paid so far on about half the 32,000 loss of income claims filed. Those claims come mostly from fisheries, tour boats, seafood wholesalers and other small businesses along the Gulf

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Time posted some great news online in time for the long weekend. As you probably know, the National Association of Realtors announced sales of existing homes jumped 23% from a year ago in April. New home sales leapt 48% from a year ago.

But here’s the best news; MacroMarkets LLC surveyed 92 economists who believe that average home prices will begin rising in 2011.

As Time noted; “That means that for the first time in years someone who buys a house this spring

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At the Predictive Methods Conference last week, it was interesting to hear MSNBC political anchor Dylan Ratigan boil all the decisions that are made in Congress to a common theme: ”I want to keep my job.”

According to Ratigan, when it comes time for critical votes and knowing which position to lead or back, that is the bottom line. He spent most of his time taking the pulse of the audience, pausing to assure us that we were consistent with the general feelings of the country when

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The good news is, wholesalers buy blocks of distressed, abandoned and foreclosed homes then flip them--often on the same day as the purchase--to investors. The investors repair and rehab the properties and mow the lawns and try to sell them.

The bad news is, well, that depends on who you ask. Many cities love wholesale flipping because it can increase the flow of property taxes into their recession-ravaged budgets. But some nonprofit groups trying to buy abandoned homes for low income

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No city wants to be on this list. Unlucky Las Vegas snagged the #1 spot. In this desert paradise, 81% of its single-family homes are underwater, meaning they are worth less than what the owners owe on their mortgages. U.S. News & World Report examined 142 American housing markets to compile its list of cities with the most negative equity.

It is a surprising list. The real estate bubble was fat as a blood-guzzling tick in Nevada, Arizona, California and Florida, so one expects to

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Am I making the right underwriting decisions in this neighborhood? What is my market share? What is my share of the foreclosure action? How does my risk outlook compare in this neighborhood, or city, or state, to my competitors, or the industry as a whole? How about my staff’s and vendor’s performance? Am I leading or lagging the industry?

Enter FNC’s Mortgage Banking Intelligence (MBI).

Imagine a production report for the last quarter, showing your daily volumes. Now overlay

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The National Collateral Database™ combines appraisal, public record and other real estate sales and descriptive information into the most powerful real estate information database available to lenders and appraisers for the valuation and analysis of residential property across the United States. It is the National Collateral Database that fuels FNC’s data and analytics products and services.

What lies behind all this? Where does all this data come from, how does it fit together and

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We have had a number of requests lately asking if we can forecast housing prices. The ability to forecast prices is an important issue. Originators would like to know what housing prices are going to do, so they can appropriately set loan-to-value (LTV) requirements. Servicers could use the information to help them determine the appropriate tradeoff between holding a property for a later sale and disposing of it now. Home equity lenders would like to know where to focus their future

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There are many different kinds of blogs out there. Some are thoughtful commentaries on the news of the day while others are basically extended versions of Facebook-style status updates. Some of you may regularly read blogs that review books or movies while others follow blogs that make you laugh. I find myself drawn to blogs that review the latest technology – those game-changing electronic toys and gadgets that are poised to revolutionize life as we know it and become the next must-have

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The appraisal review—complicated and time consuming—has always been the most challenging aspect of mortgage underwriting. It is perhaps even more so today as financial institutions place greater responsibility on their underwriting and QC divisions to manage higher volumes, increase efficiency, ensure compliance, and significantly reduce risk -- without adding staff.

For today’s reviewers, job performance is primarily based on productivity. Underwriters and Quality Control

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It has been an active year for appraisal management company (AMC) legislation. Because of the activity, we presented an update on AMC legislation in June, 2009. Since then we have updated the presentation itself to keep up with the various changes this year (although we did not catch everything).

For those of you who are keeping

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Recently one of our clients asked us to look at the relationship between sales price and appraised value across the country. We looked at about 200,000 sales transactions over the first nine months of the year and found that most of the appraised values were above the actual sales price.

The chart below shows the percent of purchase transactions where the sales price was above the appraised value.

» read full post

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posted in: Appraising, FNC, Lending, Mortgage, Valuation

Some news we have been hearing lately indicates that the worst of the recession is behind us and that the housing market is improving. No doubt many areas in the country are starting to see some improvement or at least the continuous fall in values has slowed. However, the housing market is still far from “normal” and there are a multitude of potential snags that will have to be overcome before the market can get back to anything that even resembles normal. Even the Mortgage Bankers

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Much has been written already about the circumstance where appraisers are covering greater distances than in the past in order to gain and fulfill appraisal assignments in a shrinking market. Whenever an appraiser roams over greater and greater territory, he or she needs to be concerned with one of the fundamental premises of appraising, that is, competence, especially what is called “geographic competence.” Geographic Competency is governed by the

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One of the most consistent observations FNC has been hearing lately from mortgage originators is that they are receiving appraisals from appraisers who are operating outside their regions of competence. In other words, they are appraising in neighborhoods where they don’t know the market.

As lenders know, the real value of appraisers is twofold. First, they can look at the house to assess the current condition; and second, they tend to specialize in a few markets that they know

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