Blackstone is the largest single private owner of residential homes in the U.S. with approximately 47,000 homes and about $90 billion in real estate assets. Schwarzman said his company is putting money into the housing market, although not as much as it was during the height of the financial crisis.

Plain City, Ohio-based A2Z Field Services has announced the retirement of its president, Bill McMullen, and the promotion of longtime SVP Amie Sparks-Beebe to the position of president and CEO with the company.

The Senator contends in his letter that only Congress can create government officers and that Congress has not given HUD the power to bestow an assistant secretary's responsibility onto a principal deputy assistant secretary. Grassley pointed out in his letter that Congress passed the Vacancies Reform Act in 1998 that provided several mechanisms to fill vacancies in government offices, and "[c]reating new job titles is not among the allowable mechanisms listed."

Cleveland, Ohio-based mortgage field services firm Safeguard Properties has announced the promotion of Michael Greenbaum to the position of Chief Operating Officer (COO).

Freddie Mac's total mortgage portfolio expanded at an annualized rate of 0.9 percent in March, the sixth time in the past seven months the portfolio has expanded, while the serious delinquency rate on single-family loans fell to its lowest level in six and a half years, according to Freddie Mac's March 2015 Monthly Volume Summary released on Monday.

Rood said millennials are generally drawn to live in urban areas because of convenience, lifestyle, and walkable amenities, but they are paying 30 to 40 percent more in rents than they would be paying if they owned a home – and a result, they cannot save enough money for a downpayment for a house.

Philadelphia-based LL Funds, which manages more than $1.5 billion market value non-Agency residential mortgage-backed securities, said in the white paper released Friday that the institutional investors' claims of non-performance on the part of Ocwen, made through law firm Gibbs and Bruns, are flawed.

The housing market will move steadily in 2015 driven by solid labor market improvements, low mortgage rates, an economy that is growing, and pent-up demand–but the pace should really pick up next year, according to economists who attended the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) 2015 Spring Construction Forecast Webinar earlier this week.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued Bank of America in August 2013, accusing the bank's Countrywide division of misrepresenting the mortgage-backed securities it sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the years leading up to the financial crisis through a program known as the High Speed Swim Lane (HSSL, commonly known as "Hustle").

The government alleges that Quicken had a "value appeal" process in place where Quicken would request an inflated value for a home appraisal if the appraisal was too low to approve for a loan, and that the lender granted "management exceptions" in which managers would allow underwriters to break the rules to approve a loan. According to the complaint, Quicken's most senior executives were aware of these practices based on several emails.