After issuing sweeping judgements on mortgage lending, mortgage servicers and appraisals, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has set its sights on another controversial aspect of the homebuying and selling process: the highly lucrative private student loans

The market definitely wasn’t like this a year ago. Have the tables turned, and is Chicago’s market now a seller’s

Every other day, it seems, more information trickles out showing that the real estate markets are on a slow, yet steady, path to recovery, and Lender Processing Services (LPS) has contributed to that trend with its latest data on

Asking prices in February rose 7.0 percent in the Trulia Price Monitor, as the increasing demand in the U.S. housing market continued to push asking prices higher. From January to February, asking prices rose 1.4 percent, and prices are

Well, it finally happened. After six years of jaw-dropping losses, many of them in the tens of billions of dollars, embattled GSE Freddie Mac has emerged victorious in 2012, riding the wave of the housing recovery and reporting its

The foreclosure markets showed definite signs of improvement in the RealtyTrac U.S. Foreclosure & Short Sales Report, which studied distressed property sales in 2012. Altogether, there were 947,995 distressed property sales in 2012, which is down 6 percent from 2011

Residential construction spending was flat in January, though overall construction spending remained above where it was a year ago, according to the latest analysis from the U.S. Census Bureau of the Department of

The government’s Home Affordable Refinance Program, or HARP, started out as a terrific punchline. Though sincere in its aims, the program was saddled with overly restrictive requirements for the nation’s troubled borrowers, and very few were able to take

Freddie Mac’s multifamily housing business increased dramatically in 2012, with the GSE posting its highest volume of multifamily housing business in its

News regarding the housing market has been uniformly positive the last couple of weeks. New home sales in January hit their highest level since 2008. Negative equity is improving. Contract activity has been strong, and the mortgage markets continue

The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Housing Commission threw its hat into the GSE reform ring earlier this week, issuing a detailed report calling for a gradual, yet transformative, change to how the nation’s mortgage markets currently operate – and one

The negative equity situation in the U.S. is one of improvement, reported real estate website Zillow, though there is still progress to be made. As Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist, put it, the benefits of an improving equity situation are

The Pending Home Sales Index from the National Association of Realtors rose 9.5 percent year-over-year in January, rising to its highest reading since April 2010 and boasting its 21st straight month of yearly

The Chicago homebuilding environment used to be a locally competitive one, made up primarily of local, privately-held companies. That was then, however. Now, as the housing market recovers from its worst downturn since the Great Depression, the Chicago homebuilding

New home sales posted very encouraging numbers in January, rising 15.6 percent from December to January and 28.9 percent from January 2012, according to the latest analysis by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban

Chicago home prices were down 0.7 percent in the December Case-Shiller Home Price Indices from Standard & Poor’s, as prices in Chicago continued to lag behind the rest of the