Origination

Legal expenses took a substantial bite out of Bank of America’s first-quarter earnings, resulting in a net loss of $276 million to start the year. “The cost of resolving more of our mortgage issues hurt our earnings this quarter,” said Brian Moynihan, CEO of the North Carolina-based megabank. “But the earnings power of our business and customer strategy generated solid results and we continued to return excess capital to our shareholders.”

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) released on Wednesday its Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey, reporting a 4.3 percent improvement in loan application volume for the week ending April 11. The headline index was boosted by a 7 percent gain in MBA’s measure of refinance applications, which has been weak over the past few weeks as rising mortgage rates drain the pool of remaining potential refinances.

United Wholesale Mortgage (UWM), one of the nation’s largest wholesale lenders, announced the launch of its new ‘Big & Easy Plus’ program designed for jumbo loans that don’t fit the Qualified Mortgage (QM) criteria.

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) released Tuesday its Builder Application Survey for last month, with data showing a 15 percent month-over-month increase in new home purchase applications. Using application from the survey and other market assumptions, MBA estimates sales of new single-family homes in March ran at an adjusted annualized rate of 479,000 units, a decrease of 10.1 percent from February’s anticipated pace of 533,000.

In North Carolina, the mortgage insurance (MI) unit of Genworth announced the launch of a seamless integration between itself and Optimal Blue, the mortgage industry’s largest product and pricing engine (PPE).

Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase experienced very different first quarters, as evidenced by results in their quarterly earnings reports released Friday. Wells Fargo reported a record net income of $5.9 billion for the first quarter, an increase of 14 percent from the year-ago quarter and 5 percent from Q4 2013. Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase reported profits of $5.3 billion for the quarter compared to $6.5 billion a year ago.

According to a report put out Wednesday by University of Minnesota’s Institute on Metropolitan Opportunity (IMO), Twin Cities lenders have been treating minority mortgage applicants unequally for 10 years—first by originating an inordinate number of subprime loans to minority borrowers before the crash and then by disproportionately limiting credit access to those same communities.

Member companies of Lenders One Mortgage Cooperative achieved a new record in loan volume throughout 2013, the group reported this week. According to a release, the cooperative—a national alliance of community mortgage bankers, correspondent lenders, and suppliers of mortgage products and services—collectively originated $224 billion in volume last year, a 22 percent increase over 2012.

CRMnow, a customer relationship management (CRM) firm catering to lenders, announced a new integration between its own Mortgage iQ CRM and the LendingQB loan origination system (LOS) designed to save time and enhance data integrity for mortgage brokers and bankers.

In its weekly Primary Mortgage Market Survey, Freddie Mac reported the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) averaging a rate of 4.34 percent (0.7 point) for the week ending April 10, a decline from 4.41 percent last week. A year ago at this time, the 30-year fixed was down nearly a full percentage point: 3.43 percent. Bankrate.com’s weekly national survey showed similar rate changes.