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.

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.

Ginnie Mae and the VA began drafting new lender regulations last year that would require lenders to educate veterans with more information, allowing for better decision-making in deciding on the benefit of the cost of an Interest Rate Reduction Refinancing Loan.

Natural disasters have become seemingly commonplace, as every season seems to bring a major storm, flood, hurricane or wildfire somewhere in the country. These events obviously have devastating impacts on homeowners. But on one level or another, they have also revealed weaknesses among mortgage servicers and their ability to respond appropriately.

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.

The Mortgage Bankers Association and MBA NewsLink are accepting nominations for the MBA NewsLink 2020 Tech All-Star Awards. Nominations will be accepted through Friday, Jan. 10.

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