Missed payments on office and retail mortgages rose slightly in June due to increases in delinquencies among commercial mortgages, credit ratings agency Fitch Ratings said Monday.
Fitch said June delinquencies rose to 0.41% among commercial-mortgage backed securities from 0.39% a month earlier.
Both office and retail mortgage defaults are still below the commercial mortgage delinquency average, despite [...]

Problems in the lending industry have caused great worry (both legitimate and paranoid) for prospective Real Estate consumers. But today there is some great news for the second largest mortgage lender in the country, and great news for the economy in general. According to an MSN money article dated July 16, 2008, Wells Fargo is [...]

Imperial Capital Bancorp has made a big bet on mortgage-backed securities that it thinks will pay off despite the current banking crisis.
The La Jolla-based bank said this week that so far this year it has purchased $784 million in collateralized mortgage obligations, which are complex debt securities backed by mortgages.
The move is a change in [...]

JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s losses in prime mortgages rose “dramatically” in the second quarter, Michael Cavanagh, the company’s chief financial officer, told reporters in a conference call Thursday morning.
Cavanagh said that capital markets will stay “challenging” this year and that the company reported no gain in the second quarter from its acquisition of Bear Stearns [...]

Builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes fell for a third consecutive month in July, according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI), released today. The HMI fell below its previous record low of 18 in June to a new record low of 16 in July, [...]

Tamalpais Bank (NASDAQ:TAMB) today announced a strategic relationship with Petaluma-based First California Mortgage Company to immediately begin offering residential home purchase and refinance loans of up to $10 million.
Tamalpais Bank CEO/chairman/president Mark Garwood said, “We are heeding the call of Fed chief Ben Bernanke. He has suggested that community banks play a more prominent role [...]

Recent commentary from the US Federal Reserve has shown a shift from being concerned only about the risks to economic growth in the US to a more balanced outlook where the outlook for inflation is of equal concern for policymakers.
The question is will the Fed move to address the inflation outlook in the short-term given [...]

The number of homeowners forced to give up their homes jumped last month as foreclosure filings increased by more than 50 percent compared with June of last year.
One in every 501 U.S. households either lost the home to foreclosure, received at least one foreclosure-related notice or was warned of a pending auction. Bank seizures rose [...]

Faced with record-high foreclosure rates, the Bush administration has been scrambling to keep people from losing their homes, but many are beyond help, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said today.
“There is little public policy-makers can, or should, do to compensate for untenable financial decisions,” Paulson told a forum on mortgage lending to low and medium-income [...]

With foreclosures continuing to rise, Bellevue-based DepotPoint has scored $7 million to roll out new online services that help real estate professionals better manage distressed properties.
The deal was led by OVP Venture Partners, with Trident Capital also participating.
“DepotPoint’s tools will significantly streamline the foreclosure process for banks and mortgage servicers,” said OVP’s Mark Ashida in [...]