Residential Briefs

MBA (9/29/2008 ) Palaparty, Vijay
First American Home Price Index Shows 10.9 Percent Drop
First American CoreLogic, a member of The First American Corp., Santa Ana, Calif., released its July LoanPerformance Home Price Index. The index reported nominal home prices dropped by 10.9 percent from a year ago.
An early August view of the data indicated a decline of 10.8 percent from a year ago. This continues the positive trend of no further acceleration in the pace of the rate of decline.

Virgin Money USA Enters Mortgage Industry
Virgin Money USA, Waltham, Mass., announced its entry into the mortgage lending industry. The move was made possible by the company’s recent acquisition of Lendia LLC, a mortgage lender and provider of outsourcing for originators.

Virgin Money is licensed as a mortgage lender in 23 states—representing a 61 percent increase since June—with plans to be licensed nationwide. In addition to conventional mortgages, it offers FHA-approved loans.

Softub, Metavante Launch Canadian Retail Financing Program
Softub Inc., Sudbury, Ontario, partnered with Metavante, Milwaukee, a provider of banking and payments technology, to launch a retail financing program in Canada. The program will be deployed in more than 120 of Softub's retail dealer locations across Canada.

Softub will provide consumers with in-store point-of-sale financing using Metavante’s CreditWorx technology platform. CreditWorx is a browser-based lending platform that helps lenders and vendors drive greater loan volume, reduce costs and increase profitability. Metavante will also provide Softub with dealer support and training, including account management, as well as loan contract auditing and funding fulfillment services.

Inlanta Mortgage Expands
Inlanta Mortgage, Waukesha, Wis., expanded its products and services to Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota. The company has existing partner branches in Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin.


The company’s partner branches focus on originating loans while the headquarters provides support in compliance, processing, technology, human resources, training, accounting, marketing, legal and in-house funding.

Ibis Software Integrates Mortgage Cadence Finale
Ibis Software, San Francisco, integrated its Reverse Mortgage Originator product with Finale from Mortgage Cadence, Denver. Finale offers document technology that supports reverse lenders and new lenders. The integration provides Ibis RMO customers document preparation and delivery.

Mortgage Cadence Finale has native data links within RMO, enabling lenders to create and return initial disclosures and closing packages in under 10 seconds, delivering them to the borrower or settlement agent over the web. Also, necessary calculations take place locally within Ibis RMO, preventing disparate data on multiple platforms.

Zillow Mortgage Marketplace Expands
Zillow.com, Seattle, announced that it will issue average weekly rates for the nation and select cities via press release or within Mortgage Marketplace. The rates will be released as averages of thousands of real rates quoted by lenders on the web site.

Other resources added include live rate tables and Mortgage Unzipped, a consumer-focused mortgage blog written by industry insiders. Mortgage Widget allows users to track latest mortgage rates on a website or blog.

Vantium Capital Acquires Acqura Loan Services
Vantium Capital Inc., Dallas, a mortgage company, acquired assets of Acqura Loan Services, a mortgage servicer, and two affiliated companies, Strategic Recovery Group, an asset recovery company, and Go Financial Solutions, a lender. The servicing and collection companies will remain in the Dallas area. Go Financial will relocate its operations to Dallas from Seattle.

lendingSTAT.com Launches signSTAT and VendorPRO,
lendingSTAT.com, Fresno, Calif., an on-demand software-as-a-service provider for the lending industry, launched its signSTAT and VendorPRO products for settlement service, title, lender, broker and mobile notary companies. In the U.S., national or regional settlement services, title offices, lenders and brokers can use signSTAT to manage signing service/mobile-notary line of business. VendorPRO is a tool for mobile notary and attorney vendors to receive and manage work orders submitted by customers using signSTAT.