Author: PROGRESS In Lending

Mortgage applications increased 2.3 percent from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending August 25, 2023. 

While home prices have shown a lot of strength so far in 2023, elevated mortgage rates are making it difficult for many potential buyers to purchase properties, which will likely keep a lid on additional gains for the rest of the year. Nevertheless, home prices are still expected to continue to reaccelerate and reach mid-single-digit growth rate by the year’s end, according to CoreLogic’s latest Home Price Index forecast.

MISMO, the real estate finance industry’s standards organization, published a new set of enhanced work products designed to create a standardized exchange for closing instructions information. The Master and Transactional Closing Instruction templates and XML mapping specification have reached “Candidate Recommendation” status, which means that they have been thoroughly reviewed by a wide range of organizations and industry participants and are available for use across the industry.

ATTOM released its third-quarter 2023 Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report showing that 1.3 million (1,277,612) residential properties in the United States are vacant. That figure represents 1.3 percent, or one in 79 homes, across the nation – the same as in the second quarter of this year. Here’s what it showed:

MortgageFlex, creator of the MortgageFlexONE LOS and the companion second generation, cloud-native mortgage servicing software platform, has published a new white paper entitled, “The Evolution of Modern Servicing Software: Why industry disruption from the inside is changing how the mortgage servicing industry operates.” In its new paper, company leaders suggest that it’s not the technology that leads to disruption, but rather the mortgage servicers that put it to use.

Planet Financial Group, a fully integrated family of companies delivering origination, servicing and asset management solutions, has renewed for a fifth year its partnership with the National Forest Foundation (NFF), the official nonprofit partner of the U.S. Forest Service. Through the partnership, Planet will have funded the planting of more than a quarter-million trees in our National Forests.

MISMO, the real estate finance industry’s standards organization, is publishing Version 2.1 of the SMART Doc 1.02 Standard Mapping and Implementation Guide as final.

While virtually every lender is focused on finding new business in today’s down market, they should consider focusing more attention on their employees’ experience. That’s the conclusion STRATMOR Group Senior Advisor Sue Woodard reaches in the company’s August Insights Report InFocus article, “In the Battle to Win Mortgage Borrowers, the Employee Experience Matters.”