Mortgage

The Q: The recent wild fluctuations seen in the stock market's performance haven't just freaked out banking customers. It's also worrying those with mortgages, like Steve Seffens of Westminster. "How can I find out if my bank and my mortgage company are sound?" Seffens asked. "I found PNC Bank on the FDIC Web site - the information was not useful, unless you're a financial analyst, and I couldn't even determine if PNC is insured under the FDIC. "I would also like to be able to determine if my mortgage is safe," Seffens said.

An Owings Mills man has pleaded guilty to mortgage fraud after prosecutors alleged he took money from at least 48 homeowners to help them get loan modifications, then stole the monthly payments they thought were going to their lenders, the state said Thursday. Rodney Getlan, 45, could be sentenced to as many as 90 years in prison. The state is seeking a 40-year sentence with 10 years suspended, along with restitution of about $400,000 to the victims, the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation said.

Fewer Americans sought to refinance mortgages last week after an unexpectedly strong national jobs report contributed to the biggest increase in home-loan rates since early December. The Mortgage Bankers Association's applications index declined 7.2 percent to 1,012.9, the third straight drop. The Washington-based group's gauge of applications to refinance existing mortgages fell 15 percent to 4,126.7, the second straight decline. Yields on 10-year Treasury notes, used to benchmark home loans, jumped after the Labor Department said payrolls rose the most since April 2000.

Mortgage applications plunged an annualized 53 percent during the last week of last year compared with the same week the previous year, reflecting the deceleration of the refinance boom, an industry tracker said Wednesday. The Mortgage Bankers Association said its index of loans for the week that ended Jan. 2 increased 23.5 percent from the prior week. John Karevoll, an analyst at DataQuick Information Systems, a supplier of real estate market information, said not too much should be made of the sharp decline in applications.

The rolling tsunami of home loan delinquencies and foreclosures is exposing serious problems in the mortgage industry's capacity to quickly handle borrowers' requests for help -- whether loan modifications, short sales to ward off foreclosure, or much-ballyhooed rate freezes. It is also bringing to light impediments to quick resolutions that may surprise some borrowers, such as the presence of home equity lines or second mortgages on the property. Listen to real estate attorney Nancy Gusman of Largo who represents financially distressed homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure: "It's insane," she said in an interview.

Across the country, blacks applying for home mortgages are more than twice as likely to be rejected as whites with similar incomes. In Baltimore, the situation is similar: A recent survey of six banks found rejection rates for blacks as much as five times greater than those for whites.Some see that disparity as proof positive of raw racism and rampant redlining. Why else would blacks be rejected more often than their whites counterparts of similar, and even lesser incomes, as the mortgage data show?

Anca Safta never missed a payment on her loan to expand her Lutherville home. But that didn't stop Safta's mortgage servicer from citing her this year for failing to pay, reporting her to credit agencies and threatening to foreclose. "It was just a nightmare," said Safta, a physician at the University of Maryland Medical Center who got the loan to build an extension for her parents to live in. What happened? Her servicer had not credited the payments to her account. It might seem to be a simple problem.

The number of Maryland homeowners behind on their mortgage payments but not yet in foreclosure inched downward in 2011, numbers released Thursday showed. It was the second consecutive year of improvement, but it wasn't enough to bring the state back to the levels seen before the foreclosure crisis began in 2007 — or even close to those levels. More than 100,000 homeowners without pending foreclosure cases were at least one month behind on payments at the end of last year, compared with an average of 50,000 at year-end in the first half of the last decade.

Internal Fannie Mae documents show the mortgage financier was about to launch a principal reduction program in 2010 after determining that it would save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars, a Baltimore congressman says -- contradicting claims by Fannie's regulator that such a move would be costly. U.S. Reps. Elijah E. Cummings of Baltimore and John F. Tierney of Massachusetts, Democrats who sit on the House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform, sent a joint letter Tuesday to regulator Edward DeMarco demanding more information about why the program was "mysteriously terminated" in July 2010.

Mortgage applications rose for a second week as a decline in 30-year mortgage rates to their lowest level in almost a year spurred refinancing and home sales. The Washington-based Mortgage Bankers Association said its gauge of applications increased 4.2 percent to 735.9 for the week that ended Feb. 4 from the prior week's 706.4. The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage dropped to 5.48 percent, the lowest since March of last year, from 5.61 percent. Refinancing applications rose 7.8 percent to 2,430.