Housing

American Banker readers share their views on the most pressing banking topics of the week. Comments are excerpted from reader response sections of AmericanBanker.com articles and from our social media platforms.

DotLoop, the tech startup Zillow just bought, takes the headaches and duplication out of managing real estate documents — up until the hardest part of the transaction, the mortgage. Expanding into mortgages is possible, but would be tricky.

Banks have ramped up foreclosure activity in the past five months, with default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions at their highest levels in two years. It's a positive sign that banks are finally clearing out all the distressed loans still lingering from the housing crisis. Meanwhile, banks remain cautious about new lending, partly because of regulatory actions.

There's nothing like a natural disaster to make people realize how important insurance is to the banking industry.

Bank repossessions of distressed homes hit a 30-month high in July, as financial institutions continue to work through the backlog of bubble-era loans.

WASHINGTON – The Federal Housing Finance Agency on Wednesday officially increased the target for loans purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that benefit affordable housing, but the uptick is not satisfying housing advocates.

New Supplemental Performance Metric should encourage lenders serve lower credit scores borrowers.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a regulatory mandate to shrink. But that's easier said than done, given the GSEs' outsized presence in the mortgage industry, as their latest quarterly results show.

WASHINGTON — Four more Federal Home Loan Banks have won regulatory approval to participate in a program that allows member institutions to sell jumbo mortgage loans through a conduit to Redwood Trust.

Banks that sold faulty mortgage-backed securities right before the crisis have suffered a string of legal defeats over the timing of government lawsuits, but some experts believe the industry may still have a shot in the Supreme Court.