Redlining Isn’t What it Used To Be
Discrimination and Bias in Residential Lending
Consumer Finance Monitor Podcast Episode: Foreclosing on “Zombie” Mortgages: What Lenders and Servicers Should Know
Life After Love Gone Wrong Podcast: Season 3, Episode 2 - Mortgage Mastery: Charting a Financial Course Post-Divorce
Law Brief®: Robert Wolf, Alexander Tiktin and Richard Schoenstein Discuss the Continuing Foreclosure/Eviction Moratorium
Bar Exam Toolbox Podcast Episode 146: Listen and Learn -- Mortgages and Priority
Credit Eco to Go Podcast - Not a Normal Mortgage Crisis: How the Mortgage Industry Weathered the Pandemic
Not a Normal Mortgage Crisis: How the Mortgage Industry Weathered the Pandemic
In The Cross-Hairs? Protecting Your Company Against Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Investigations and Investors' Mortgage Buyback Claims
Condo Adviser: What is 'FHA approved,' exactly?
Bill on Bankruptcy: Trustees Sleep Easy after High Court Ruling
Bill on Bankruptcy: Sigmund Freud, Marx Brothers, Bernie Madoff
Critical Mortgage Regulatory Updates by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for 2013 and 2014
Bill on Bankruptcy: Delaware to Continue Dominating Bankruptcy
What’s Next from the CFPB
Former Congressman Steve Bartlett Joins the LEVICK Team
Today’s ever-shifting business environment means that consumers, businesses, employers, and employees all expect to transact digitally. To remain efficient and competitive, companies must digitally transform their businesses....more
The Fair Housing Act Applies to Residential Real Estate Appraisals - The Fair Housing Act (FHA) was passed in 1968 to prohibit housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, and national origin. Since then, the...more
What Happened? The lender and consumers reached a settlement in an appraisal bias case, Nathan Connolly and Shani Mott v. Shane Lanham, 20/20 Valuations, LLC, and loanDepot.com, LLC, filed in Maryland District Court, that...more
Editor's Note: The following newsletter provides a roundup summarizing enforcement actions, guidance, rulemakings, and other public statements taken by a federal and/or state financial services regulatory agency, specifically...more
On December 8, 2023, oral arguments were held before a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in the CFPB v. Townstone Financial case, in which the CFPB alleges that Townstone Financial, a...more
Recently the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) entered into a proposed consent order with Ameris Bank to resolve allegations of redlining from 2016 through 2021 in majority Black and Hispanic areas in the Bank’s Jacksonville,...more
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced a settlement agreement with Washington Trust Company, of Westerly (WTC) to resolve claims that WTC redlined majority Black and Hispanic neighborhoods in Rhode Island....more
Mortgage originators and secondary market issuers use automated valuation models (AVMs) in determining the worth of collateral securing mortgages on consumers’ principal dwellings. As part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform...more
The Mortgage Bankers Association and Housing Policy Council (the “Associations”) recently filed an Amici Curiae brief supporting the position of Townstone Financial regarding the scope of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act...more
With a roll-out led by Vice President Harris, the federal financial services regulators have released the long-awaited proposed automated valuation model (AVM) rule, referencing both home appraisal bias in mortgage lending...more
On March 17, HUD announced the submission of a final rule—Reinstatement of HUD’s Discriminatory Effects Standard—which would rescind the agency’s 2020 regulation governing Fair Housing Act (FHA or the Act) disparate impact...more
In early March 2023, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a special edition of its Supervisory Highlights that focused exclusively on “junk fees” uncovered in supervisory examinations in various industries,...more
On February 27, the CFPB entered a consent order against a California-based mortgage lender (respondent) for alleged repeat violations of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, TILA (Regulation Z), and the Mortgage Acts and...more
On February 14, CFPB Fair Lending Director Patrice Ficklin joined senior leaders from the FDIC, HUD, NCUA, Federal Reserve Board, DOJ, OCC, and FHFA in submitting a joint letter to The Appraisal Foundation (TAF) urging the...more
In this article, we share a timeline of our monthly "bites" for 2022 applicable to the Mortgage industry. So, what happened in 2022?...more
A&B ABstract: Mortgage assumptions – where a buyer assumes the existing mortgage loan of a seller – have fluctuated in popularity since the 1980s....more
Ginnie Mae advises in the report that in early 2016 it and investors in Ginnie Mae guaranteed MBS “first began to identify a wave of early loan repayments and serial refinancing as a problem with much greater incidence in VA...more
On July 27, 2022, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a complaint and proposed consent order in a federal district court alleging that a mortgage company...more
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) and U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ”) reached a settlement with Trustmark National Bank (“Trustmark”) to resolve allegations that it discriminated against Black and Hispanic...more
On June 28, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a new rule (Rule) setting forth loss mitigation/loan modification steps residential mortgage loan servicers must take in regard to mortgage loan borrowers due...more
[co-author: John Ropiequet] The fair lending cases filed by Miami against four major mortgage lenders, reported in several previous Annual Surveys, came to a sudden, anticlimactic end when the city voluntarily dismissed...more
REMOVALS- Can I be removed from my home as a result of a foreclosure proceeding during the COVID-19 emergency? No. On March 19, 2020, New Jersey Governor Philip Murphy issued Executive Order 106, which suspended...more
On March 1, 2021, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a report titled “Housing Insecurity and the COVID-19 Pandemic” (the Report), which summarizes some of the relevant data and research on the impact of...more
Since the beginning of the year and the change in Presidential administrations, a number of relief measures granted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have been extended. Below are updates regarding relief measures in place...more
On July 15, 2020, the CPFB filed a complaint in federal court against Townestone Financial, Inc. (Townestone) representing the first ever redlining complaint against a non-bank mortgage lender. ...more