Secondary Market

A new director of sales has been appointed at New American Funding. The national mortgage lender and Fannie Mae seller and servicer has hired Darren Kidder to fill the role.

Despite the deteriorating situation in Europe, the United States housing market's recent gains should drive up stocks valuations for building products companies in the near future, Barclays said in a report Tuesday. Barclays├â┬ó├óÔÇÜ┬¼├óÔÇ×┬ó U.S. Building Products & Homebuilding report shows that valuations for building products stocks under the institution's coverage are in the lower half of their historical trading ranges, largely due to "fairly lackluster" first-quarter earnings caused by lag between home purchases and building products sales. Financial crises in the euro zone are also driving down building products stocks.

According to Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies, the key to the housing market recovery is job growth. "What the for-sale market needs most is a sustained increase in employment to bring household growth back to its long-term pace," the Joint Center said in its recent report, The State of the Nation's Housing 2012. Multifamily starts rose 54 percent and home improvement spending rose 0.6 percent over the year in 2011 and single family housing starts declined 8.6 percent over the year.

Mortgage rates saw increases across the board after nearly two months in record-low territory, with Freddie Mac revealing in a weekly survey Thursday that the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage ticked up to 3.71 percent. The GSE found that the 30-year loan's increase ended a six-week streak of falling rates. At the same time last year, the fixed-rate mortgage averaged 4.50 percent. The 15-year FRM also slid up, averaging 2.98 percent (0.7 point). The average was 2.94 percent last week, according to Freddie Mac.

HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Federal Housing Administration Acting Commissioner Carol Galante announced in a press conference Friday FHA's program to sell mortgage loan pools to investors. The Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, designed to give homeowners with seriously delinquent loans a chance to avoid foreclosure, is an expansion of an earlier FHA pilot program that allows investors to purchase loan pools headed for foreclosure. Investors are then charged with the task of working to bring the loan out of default. The program starts in September 2012 with a sale of the loan pools.

SunTrust Mortgage has appointed new leadership, with the announcement of two new executive vice presidents. Peter E. Mahoney will join SunTrust as the EVP of mortgage strategy, and Jack Wixted will become an EVP and the chief risk officer for the company.

For aspiring blue bloods, escaping to Cape Cod is a must during the summer season, and while the real estate market in The Cape boasts classic, shingled architecture in abundance, one cool development in Provincetown, Massachusetts, is breaking with tradition.

First time claims for unemployment insurance rose to 3086,000 for the week ended June 9, from the prior week's 38,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Economists had expected the report would show 3795,000 initial claims.

In a letter filed Wednesday to FHFA, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association expressed its view that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should seek to align their operations as much as possible. The alignment would help set the stage and ease transition into the future for the GSEs, SIFMA suggests. Market performance shows a gap between the perceived and actual performance and liquidity of mortgage backed securities issued by the GSEs. The liquidity differential impacts the cost and efficiency of the GSE securitization process and the ability of the Enterprises to fund mortgage lending.

Public interest group Judicial Watch announced Tuesday that it filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to obtain records detailing President Obama's "recess appointment" of CFPB director Richard Cordray. Judicial Watch, a group dedicated to investigating and fighting possible government corruption, says it submitted a FOIA request on January 12 to CFPB seeking access to records of communications between the bureau, the White House, the Executive Office of the President, the Treasury, and Congress concerning Cordray├â┬ó├óÔÇÜ┬¼├óÔÇ×┬ós appointment to his post.