Homeland Security, New York DFS Issue Warnings on Potential Iran Cybersecurity Breaches

In the wake of the U.S. military drone strike against the leader of Iran’s special operations forces last week, the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the New York Department of Financial Services, issued warnings about potential Iranian cybersecurity threats targeting U.S. businesses, particularly financial institutions.

CoreLogic: November Home Prices Increase by 3.7% from Year Ago

CoreLogic, Irvine, Calif., reported this morning home prices rose both year over year and month over month in November. Home prices increased nationally by 3.7% from a year ago; on a month-over-month basis, prices increased by 0.5% from October.

Investor-Driven Lender Growth in CRE Finance

The rise of debt funds, mortgage real estate investment trusts and other players in commercial real estate finance that MBA refers to broadly as “investor-driven lenders” has been at the heart of commercial real estate finance’s narrative this cycle–particularly in recent years.

API Standards: The Mortgage Industry’s Next Big Challenge

While relatively new to the mortgage industry, Interest in application programming interfaces and microservices is soaring. These system-to-system technologies have the potential to tremendously enhance communications between lenders, technology vendors and service providers, much better than the traditional, large-scale integrations to exchange data between monolithic systems that are in use today.

Residential Briefs

First American Financial Corp., Santa Ana, Calif., acquired Title Security Agency LLC, a brand within the Arizona real estate community. First American had been a minority owner for five years.

People in the News

OptifiNow, Seal Beach, Calif., hired Linn Cook as Vice President of Sales, responsible for leading sales of its cloud-based sales and marketing platform.