Market Digest

Just 10 months after initiating outreach to customers through its National Homeownership Retention Program (NHRP), Bank of America has provided mortgage relief to 100,000 eligible homeowners with certain Countrywide subprime and option-ARM mortgages. According to the bank’s most recent quarterly progress report, more than 31,000 eligible customers received assistance in the third quarter – the [...]

Home loan servicers and lenders are not working with borrowers who need loan modifications in order to keep their homes. In a third survey of California mortgage counseling agencies servicing homeowners statewide, the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC) found that despite lenders’ promises to help borrowers, foreclosure is still the most common outcome for homeowners struggling [...]

Expands Search by More Than 4 Million More Homes, Increasing Redfin’s Reach by Almost 40% to 16 Million Homes
Online real estate broker Redfin Corporation today launched its real estate e-commerce service for the Chicago area, its eighth market overall and first new market in 2008. Redfin’s brokerage, headquartered in Schaumburg, Ill., now serves Cook [...]

Pinpoint Agent breaks through to some very personal information on real estate agents, letting consumers know more than ever about who represents them.
Pinpoint Agent, Inc. today announced the national release of its flagship, patent-pending consumer search tool at http://www.pinpointagent.com/. This new, free website breaks a lot of personal taboos, allowing consumers to find an agent [...]

With the goal of helping more families keep their homes rather than lose them to foreclosure, Federal Housing Administration Commissioner Brian Montgomery, Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight Director James Lockhart and Harvard University Director and former House Financial Services Chairman Jim Leach addressed a crowd of more than 400 Realtors(R) at the National Association [...]

Fixed mortgage rates were largely unchanged this week. The average conforming 30-year fixed mortgage rate backtracked to 6.13 percent, according to Bankrate.com’s weekly national survey of large lenders. The average 30-year fixed mortgage has an average of 0.40 discount and origination points.
The average 15-year fixed rate mortgage popular for refinancing was unchanged at 5.71 percent, [...]

On the heels of integrating Google Maps Street View(TM) in 680 cities nationwide, RealEstate.com today announces several new search features created specifically to empower and to educate home shoppers browsing the site’s nearly two million listings.
Now, house hunters visiting RealEstate.com can get their fingers on neighborhood information for more than 22,000 cities nationwide while searching [...]

Fixed mortgage rates inched upward for the third week in a row, with the average conforming 30-year fixed mortgage rate rising to 6.16 percent. According to Bankrate.com’s weekly national survey of large lenders, the average 30-year fixed mortgage has an average of 0.36 discount and origination points.
The average 15-year fixed rate mortgage popular for refinancing [...]