Banks, Real Estate | featured news

Banks seized more than a million U.S. homes in one year for the first time last year, despite a slowdown in the last few months as questions around foreclosure processing arose, a leading firm said on Thursday.

In a ruling that may affect foreclosures nationwide, the Massachusetts high court has voided the seizure of two homes by Wells Fargo & Company and US Bancorp after the banks failed to show that they held the mortgages at the time of the foreclosures.

Regulators have opened a new line of inquiry in their mortgage foreclosure probe and are asking big Wall Street banks about the beginning stages of mortgage securitization, two sources familiar with the probe said.

Changing the face of foreclosure in America will take some time, several state attorneys general said Wednesday, cautioning that an agreement with major lenders over revamped foreclosure practices was not imminent. "We want to move as quickly as possibly but it has to be done right," said Roy Cooper, the attorney general of North Carolina. "We have plowed this ground before."Ever since the law enforcement officials from all 50 states signed on last month to a highly publicized investigation of big mortgage lenders, there has been a public tug of war.

With one out of every 245 Minnesota housing units in foreclosure during September, news has broken that Wells Fargo, along with other big banks, may have helped push some homeowners off properties with the use of "robo signers."And the bank, with deep ties to Minnesota, has no intention of changing its ways.

Officials in 49 states have launched a joint investigation into allegations that mortgage companies mishandled documents and broke laws in foreclosing on hundreds of thousands of homeowners.

The attorneys general of up to 40 states plan to announce soon a joint investigation into banks' use of flawed foreclosure paperwork.

The number of U.S. homes taken back by banks through foreclosure hit a record high in the second quarter, even as lenders delayed more homes from entering the process through short sales and loan modification efforts, according to data to be released Thursday.

A record number of U.S. homes were lost to foreclosure in the first three months of this year, a sign banks are starting to wade through the backlog of troubled home loans at a faster pace, according to a new report....

A deal maker at Lehman pioneered ways to package debt which brought huge profits but set off the bank’s collapse.