On the heels of the paperwork scandal that prompted some of the country’s biggest lenders to halt foreclosure proceedings, distressed home sales jumped significantly in December as foreclosures resumed. According to a new report from Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance, 47.2 percent of all U.S. home sales involved distressed properties in December, up from 44.5 percent in November and back near September’s 47.5 percent peak, just before the robo-signing scandal came to light. TRD [more]

From the South Florida Web site: With mortgages hard to come by, some developers are lending the money to buyers themselves in order to sell units.
“It just reflects the fact that it’s not easy to get financing for a condo unit,” said Guy Cecala, CEO and publisher of the Maryland-based Inside Mortgage Finance Publications, a group of industry newsletters. “They’re the black sheep of the mortgage market.”
That’s especially true in South Florida where it’s ground zero for the condo market crash, he said. Since the peak of the boom years in 2006, condo prices have dropped around 50 percent, according to real estate tracking company Zillow.com.
So condo projects like the Luxuria in Boca Raton, 1200 Hillsboro Mile, which is just south of Boca Raton in Hillsboro Beach, and the 1800 Club in Miami, a 42-story luxury condo in the Miami Performing Arts District, are finding alternatives to the traditional mortgage market.

From the February issue: When the Federal Reserve Board invites comments on proposed changes to
one of its regulations, a few hundred responses typically trickle in.
But before its recent deadline for feedback on amendments that
would revise the disclosure rules for closed-end mortgages, or
mortgages that can’t be paid off until they mature, the agency was
deluged with nearly 4,000 comments.
Many came from loan originators, in New York and elsewhere, who
alleged that the Fed’s proposal to restrict a compensation practice
known as yield-spread premiums –YSPs for short — will put mortgage
brokers out of business and hamper lending.