The Reverse Mortgage Counseling Association (RMCA), a non-profit trade association, is offering a new tool to help streamline the HECM counseling process and increase consumer knowledge about reverse mortgages. Through ReversePackage.com, consumers, lenders, and counselors have access to new tools that help them effectively follow the new HECM Counseling protocol.  ”This new program helps the counselors [...]

Earlier this week, Bankrate, Inc. released its “2010 Closing Cost Survey” which revealed that the costs associated with buying a home are seemingly on the rise. Ultimately, the study found the average origination and title fees on a $200,000 mortgage in 2010 totaled $3,741, up 36.6 percent from $2,739 in 2009. Bankrate surveyed one area [...]

The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it’s allowing lenders to re-certify condo projects that were initially approved on or after January 1, 2000. While Mortgagee Letter 2009-46 provided information regarding re-certification requirements, HUD said that systems were not able to handle the process.  This lead to backups in approvals and ultimately delayed closing for [...]

As part of the many proposals from the Federal Reserve last week, a new report details the work done to develop new reverse mortgage disclosures and shows that while misconceptions about the product remain, consumer protections have improved. Conducted by ICF Macro, the research consisted of two rounds of focus groups held in Bethesda, MD [...]

Despite reverse mortgage volume being down 40% during the first half of the year, John Lunde, President of Reverse Market Insight tells BankRate that he believes sales are going to pick up when the new HECM Lite product is rolled out. According to Bankrate:

The sale of existing U.S. homes sank 27.2% in July following expiration of the home buyer tax credit but home prices continued to gain, according to the National Association of Realtors. The number of existing home sales fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.83 million in July from 5.26 million the month before, the [...]