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PLTA is proud to offer ALTA News to members
ALTA News: Headlines and news from various media sources, keeping you
"in the know" about issues impacting business and the real estate and
mortgage markets.
The U.S. housing market has had a slow start this year, with existing-home sales hitting a 16-month low in January as high prices and economic worries keep would-be buyers to the sidelines. But experts, citing the latest data on the economy, say this year’s “chilly start” may not necessarily be a sign of what is ahead for the U.S. housing market, as Realtor.com wrote in a recent update.
Homebuilders are trying to lure homebuyers with incentives, despite builders facing higher costs to build a new home. Builder confidence in the market for newly built, single-family homes fell one point to 36 in February, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB)/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index released Tuesday.
Lenders to commercial real estate owners are reaching the breaking point, calling in tens of billions of dollars of troubled loans. Refinancing property debt has become difficult since interest rates started to soar in 2022. Many lenders initially extended maturing loans they made when borrowing costs were far lower, hoping that either interest rates would fall or that cash flows would grow. It is a strategy known as “extend and pretend.” Now, many lenders have stopped pretending, and the default rate is surging
For homeowners who sell their house later in life, that timing may come with a cost, new research suggests. Once sellers reach about age 70, they start getting lower sale prices for their houses compared with younger homeowners, according to a January research brief published by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
Foreclosure activity nationwide continued its year-over-year ascent in January 2026, according to the latest ATTOM Data January 2026 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report. For the 11th consecutive month, annual foreclosure filings rose, signaling a continuation of a trend that first emerged in early 2025. In January, 40,534 properties nationwide reported foreclosure filings — which include default notices, scheduled auction notices, and bank repossessions — marking a 32% increase from January 2025.
The Federal Reserve doesn’t just manage interest rates. It regulates banks, too. And on Monday, a top Fed official said the central bank is rethinking some regulations around mortgages, which might just make mortgages slightly easier to get. After the 2008 housing market crash, banks bolted out of the mortgage business.
“Jack was a devoted leader in the title industry and served with distinction on both the state and national levels,” ALTA CEO Chris Morton said in a statement. “As the third generation to serve as president and CEO of Rattikin Title and president of both TLTA and ALTA, he carried forward a family legacy of service, helping to preserve and protect the future of the industry he loved.”
“The Housing for the 21st Century Act is a meaningful step forward in tackling the affordability crisis by supporting housing supply, modernizing federal programs and reducing unnecessary barriers that slow development,” said American Land Title Association CEO Chris Morton. “As policymakers work to expand homeownership opportunities, the title insurance industry will continue to play a critical role in protecting consumers and helping ensure buyers and lenders can move through the closing process with confidence.”
Federal authorities have charged a licensed real estate broker and three others in a sophisticated "home stealing" scheme involving a $1.5 million Burbank, California residence. The scheme involved obtaining a $975,000 loan by impersonating both the property owner and a fake buyer through a corrupt escrow process. Last year, ALTA published two new policy endorsements designed to help protect homeowners from seller impersonation fraud. ALTA also has developed many resources to help members provide education about this fraud.
Mortgage rates fell this week, with the 30-year fixed rate averaging 6.16%, down from 6.23% last week, according to Bankrate’s latest lender survey.
High home prices, faltering supply and weaker consumer confidence in the economy all continue to weigh on the U.S. housing market. The chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, Lawrence Yun, is calling it “a new housing crisis.”
Pennsylvania needs to update its laws and invest money in housing production to create 450,000 new housing units by 2035, Gov. Josh Shapiro said. The Democratic governor unveiled the state's first long-term housing strategy in Philadelphia on Thursday, calling for public investment in infrastructure, modernizing planning and regulatory policies and adding legal protections for tenants.
The "McMansion" is officially moving from a status symbol to liability. Twenty years after the 2006 housing boom, new data from Zillow reveals a fundamental reversal in the American Dream: Buyers are ditching "wasted scale" and mahogany-heavy footprints for high-efficiency "sanctuaries."
Freezing temperatures and high home prices snuffed out the sales momentum from previous months Home sales fell 8.4% in January, the biggest monthly decline since February 2022, after snowstorms and low consumer confidence slowed a housing market that was showing signs of recovery. Sales of existing homes fell from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.91 million, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday.
The housing market continues to favor buyers, forcing prices to slide and affordability to improve, according to a new report from Redfin. Americans needed to earn $111,252 per year to afford the average home for sale in December, down 4% from $115,870 a year ago and 8.8% from a peak of $122,000 in June, the report showed.
Underwriting processes will see the greatest transformation — and the biggest lift — from artificial intelligence this year, and the outcomes it produces should aid in instilling confidence among buyers and lenders. In a recent National Mortgage News survey, 57% of respondents predicted AI-driven underwriting would create the greatest mortgage industry change this year, with technology now at a point to begin achieving breakthroughs discussed for decades.
2026 has gotten off to a slow start for the US housing market, with existing-home sales sliding by 8.4% in January even as affordability continued to improve. The National Association of Realtors said Thursday that the monthly drop – and a 4.4% annual decrease in activity – marked a “disappointing” kickoff for this year’s market, even if it was mitigated slightly by unusually cold weather across plenty of the country.
Investors have maintained a substantial presence in the U.S. single-family home market in 2025, capturing roughly 30% of all purchases through the end of the year, according to the latest Cotality Home Investor Report Q4 2025. That figure marks a slight year-over-year uptick compared with the 29% share recorded at the close of 2024.
The land title insurance community mourns the loss of ALTA Past President Jack Rattikin III, a respected leader whose decades of service helped shape both his company and the broader industry. Rattikin’s passing on Feb. 9 is a moment for the title insurance community to reflect not only on his leadership and service, but also on the profound legacy that defined his life and career. For Rattikin, legacy was more than a family tradition. It was a commitment he carried forward every day as a leader, mentor and steward of a multi-generation title business that helped shape the industry.
ALTA CEO Chris Morton discussed the responsible adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in his latest HousingWire column published this week: When AI is used as a tool — to reduce redundant work, surface inconsistencies and focus human expertise where it matters most — it can meaningfully improve the closing process. But if it is used to replace professional review in areas where certainty is required, it risks doing the opposite: putting homebuyers and lenders in greater peril, not less.
A construction lender just learned the hard way that having documents in your file means you actually have to read them. First State Bank of the Southeast thought it had done everything right. It made a construction loan to a builder, recorded its mortgage at the county clerk's office, and sat back as the first lienholder. But on February 6, 2026, the Kentucky Court of Appeals handed down a decision that should make every construction lender take a second look at what is sitting in their loan files.
Supply and demand in the housing market will combine to keep home prices flat this year as President Donald Trump’s efforts to improve affordability barely move the needle, according to JPMorgan Global Research. In a year-ahead forecast published Jan. 27, analysts said price growth will stall at 0% in 2026 after nearly doubling over the past decade, with a slight improvement in demand likely neutralizing a supply uptick.
U.S. homeowners are staying in their houses for the longest time in at least 25 years, largely thanks to their low mortgage rates, data shows. That — along with still-high home prices and tight inventory — is keeping the housing market on ice. Sellers at the end of 2025 had owned their homes for an average of 8.6 years — a record in data going back to early 2000, when the average was 4.2 years.
They’re called “zombie mortgages” — debts that homeowners thought were forgiven long ago, only to learn that they still exist and could cost them their homes. Economics correspondent Paul Solman and producer Diane Lincoln Estes report on these back-from-the-dead debts, in partnership with the documentary news group Retro Report.
The housing market has cooled off this winter with the annual pace of home price growth easing to levels unseen since the nation was recovering from the Great Recession. And while some areas continue to see strong price growth, others have seen notable declines. New data from Cotality, a data analytics and tech company in the real estate, mortgage and insurance industries, showed that annual housing price growth slowed to just 0.9% in December, which was one of the softest rates since the post-Great Recession recovery.
The February 2026 ICE Mortgage Monitor Report has been published by Intercontinental Exchange, Inc. The analysis indicates that the drop in mortgage rates at the start of January created refinancing opportunities for almost five million borrowers and contributed to affordability reaching a four-year peak.
The ALTA 50 Endorsement is designed to address originating lenders’ requests for the deletion of certain exceptions relating to solar energy systems installed on one-to-four family residences, and to meet Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac selling guide requirements in relation to those solar energy systems. Read on to learn more.
On Monday evening, the full U.S. House passed overwhelmingly (390-9) H.R. 6644, the Housing for the 21st Century Act. The housing package aims to tackle supply and affordability challenges, modernize local development, and improve government housing programs. ALTA supports this legislation and was a part of the real estate coalition that helped craft this bill.
ALTA applauded the U.S. House of Representatives for passing the bipartisan Housing for the 21st Century Act, legislation aimed at modernizing federal housing policy and expanding access to safe, sustainable homeownership. The bill was passed by a vote of 390-9.
The share of U.S. homeowners with high rates on their mortgages has jumped sharply in just the last few years. That’s having a marked impact on the refinance market and a somewhat more muted impact on home sales. Rates have been front and center in the debate over how to improve home affordability—and for good reason.
There are two ways to get back to the level of home affordability Americans had for much of the last decade, according to Realtor.com. Neither looks realistic anytime soon. In 2019, the mortgage payment for a median-priced home took up about 21% of median household income. Today, it accounts for more than 30%, reflecting sharply higher home prices and mortgage rates that have nearly doubled since January 2022, according to a recent analysis from the real estate listings platform.
Employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January, the highest tally for the first month of the year since 2009, according to a report out Feb. 5, and a sign employers may be taking defensive steps against economic uncertainty.
Three of the nation's largest housing markets are seeing a sharp rise in the number of homes for sale, giving buyers more choices even as the overall U.S. housing market shows signs of cooling. In January, 46 of the country’s biggest metro areas had more homes on the market than they did a year earlier. Seattle saw the biggest increase, with inventory jumping 32.4%.
Imagine walking into a car dealership and being told that a new car would cost you less than a used car. All else being equal, a buyer would likely wonder, “What’s the catch?” Examining what the Mortgage Bankers Association recently described as a “relatively large number of new homes available for sale,” a new analysis from the Urban Institute highlights how that backlog of completed unsold homes has resulted in an unusual reversal of which homes typically fly the highest price tags.
Mortgage fraud risk continued a gradual climb through the end of 2025, according to the latest Cotality National Mortgage Application Fraud Risk Index. The quarterly index for Q4 2025 registered 133, a modest increase from the prior quarter and a 1.5% year-over-year rise compared with Q4 2024. That level translates to an estimated one in every 118 mortgage applications showing indications of potential fraud.
The housing market has been a sensitive topic for many Americans over the past few years, according to new Rocket data and Yahoo Finance. With mortgage rates and home prices staying high beyond pandemic levels, many people lost faith in the American dream of homeownership, with younger generations abandoning the notion entirely.
Mortgage application activity moved lower again last week, extending the pullback from January’s earlier burst of demand as weather disruptions and softening purchase activity weighed on overall volume. The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) reported that applications declined 8.9% for the week ending January 30.
Reverse mortgage borrowers whose loans were previously serviced by U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) subcontractor NOVAD Management Consulting LLC may receive reimbursement checks in the mail following a 2024 enforcement action brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association (NRMLA) notified its members on Friday morning in a memo. The CFPB’s website states that “affected consumers are receiving a refund because of a settlement in this lawsuit” and that as of Jan. 30, victim compensation is ongoing.
When Dan Kuncio and Maria Karpov, who live part-time at 12 First Light Lane, learned three years ago that a vacant lot at 10 First Light Lane, abutting their property, was listed for sale online, the wheels in their minds started turning. Fortunately, their lawyer, Karen A. LaVoie, became suspicious.
In Ageron Energy LLC v. ETC Texas Pipeline, LTD Justice Busby authored a concurring opinion in the denial of a petition for review to the Supreme Court in which he criticized the majority opinion of the Court of Appeals saying it undermines important protections afforded mineral rights owners.
America faces a serious housing shortage, one that Moody’s estimates would take more than 2 million new homes to resolve. But over at Goldman Sachs, analysts put the number at 3 million. Zillow’s estimate tops 4 million, while Brookings projects 5 million, and McKinsey says 8 million. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans insist the shortfall is closer to 20 million.
More homes hit the market in January, but inventory growth is contracting as builders pull back in response to depleted demand. Active listings were up 10% YOY, the 27th consecutive month of gains, Realtor.com’s January Housing Report found. But that momentum is slowing: growth, while positive, has diminished for the last nine of those months.
Americans are holding onto their homes longer before selling, particularly in pricey coastal markets. Homeowners who sold in the fourth quarter of 2025 owned their homes for an average of 8.55 years — up from 8.05 at the same time last year and the longest stretch in data going back to 2000, according to ATTOM, a real estate data company.
The three credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — say the complaint portal is being abused by third-party credit repair firms and AI bots. Credit repair firms are using the CFPB's complaint portal to try to remove accurate but negative information from credit reports. Credit reporting complaints hit an all-time high in 2024 of more than 2 million complaints, up 180% over two years.
Congress has ended a three-day partial shutdown by approving funding for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and other agencies through Sept. 30, 2026. Congress cleared the fiscal year 2026 spending package that was subsequently signed into law by President Trump, ending a brief partial government shutdown that began early Jan. 31. The House approved the measure Tuesday afternoon, following Senate passage late last week.
Homebuilders facing a glut of unsold houses—the largest in 15 years—are quietly turning to Washington for help, hoping federal action might keep their inventories from becoming financial dead weight. The Wall Street Journal reports that companies such as Lennar and Taylor Morrison have met with senior administration officials, including Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, to discuss potential relief measures.
President Donald Trump’s economy is booming. But if you’re looking for a job, good luck. The Labor Department reported on Thursday that job openings in December unexpectedly dropped to their lowest level since mid-2020, during the heart of the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s a sign that companies have cooled on hiring despite an economic expansion that the White House has framed as the dawn of a new Golden Age.
After over three years of work by the Joint ALTA/NSPS Work Group, the 2026 Minimum Standard Detail Requirements for ALTA/NSPS Land Title Surveys were adopted by the American Land Title Association and the National Society of Professional Surveyors in October 2025 with an effective date of Feb. 23, 2026.
Late-stage mortgage delinquencies—defined as payments at least 90 days past due—increased 18.6% in December compared with a year earlier, a new report has found. The share of mortgages in that stage of nonpayment increased to 0.2%, up from just under 0.17% in December 2024, according to new research from credit scoring firm VantageScore.
Home builders are scrambling to offer new policy proposals to the White House, looking for help to unload the biggest glut of housing inventory in 15 years. The policy list includes streamlining the federal permitting process and using federal grants to incentivize local governments to enact zoning overhauls, according to a person familiar with the matter.
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