After months of wrangling with fellow multiple listing service members, Seattle-based online brokerage Redfin Thursday added real-estate agent comments about listings, called Agent Insights.

What makes this upgrade a real game-changer for customers is the sheer number of homes we tour, Redfin President and Chief Executive Glenn Kelman wrote Thursday. Agent Insights isn’t an empty social network that we are hoping will one day come alive, or one patrolled by trolls and spammers. On the day of launch, we already have 13,793 Agent Insights about homes currently for sale, each one from a licensed Redfin agent, each double-checked to make sure it is factual and intelligible to customers.

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An origination fee is an up-front charge for processing a new loan application. The mortgage lender thinks of this as compensation for setting up the mortgage loan as a sort of a commission-based payment or activation fee. A percentage of the mortgage loan amount normally expresses such an expense. The rates for these fees can vary greatly and occasionally go as high as 5%, but the normal range falls between 0.5% and 1% on mortgage loans. Points, which are expressed as a percent of the loan amount, should include the origination fee and coupled they will determine the lender’s charges. It is different from points, however, since an origination fee does not change, like points do, with the current interest rate. Read full post…

The nation’s largest banks are being asked to write down the principal on some troubled mortgages as part of a settlement of last year’s robo-signing scandal, major news outlets are reporting.

A 27-page proposal from a coalition of the nation’s 50 state attorneys general, with the backing of several federal agencies, was reportedly sent Thursday to the nation’s largest mortgage servicers, including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo, among others. The proposal appears to outline actions the states and federal agencies want the lenders to take in return for dropping charges related to the scandal.   At th Read full post…

Anyone in the market for a mortgage loan is being asked to reconsider making a home purchase until prices drop further, according to a new report from CNN Money. In the report, one expert predicted we could see a housing double dip, meaning any homes purchased now could be in danger of falling underwater.

Home Prices Could Drop 25 Percent

A government report released on Feb. 24 revealed that January experienced a double-digit dip in the number of new homes sold. A couple of days earlier, it was revealed that 90 percent of major U.S. cit

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