Third-party review firm Allonhill today announced hired Tammy Schiff as chief marketing officer.

Ashford Hospitality Trust, Dallas, has restructured and extended the maturity date on a $203.4 million mortgage loan that was originally due this month.

A10 Capital hired Chuck Taylor to head Southeast markets for the firm.

Gleacher & Co. added a new managing director to Gleacher & Company Securities, its broker dealer subsidiary.

The European securitization market remained open for business despite the looming threat the impending sovereign downgrades can have on deals.

HARP 2.0's first phase is now underway. Seller/servicers that control GSE MSRs appear to be in the best position when it comes to refinancing high LTV Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans.The GSE regulator and Obama administration officials had hoped to make the process more competitive, allowing “new” seller/servicers to refinance loans controlled by others. But it now appears that servicer-against-servicer competition won't get under way until March when the GSEs get around to updating their automated underwriting systems to accommodate Home Affordable Refinancing Program revisions.

Interactive Mortgage Advisors (IMA), Denver, is auctioning off a $186 million bulk package of Ginnie Mae servicing rights.The seller's identity was not disclosed. A majority of the loans were funded in the mid-Atlantic and New England area and is heavily weighted toward New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

One of the hallmarks of the Dodd-Frank bill was the creation of the Office of Financial Research (OFR), an agency dedicated to collecting and sifting data from financial firms to help predict the next crisis.

U.K. mortgage origination is unlikely to grow more than marginally next year thanks to economic uncertainty and steep borrowing costs faced by originating banks, according to a release by Standard & Poor's. As a result, the agency estimates that the volume of RMBS placed with investors in 2012 could hover around €45 billion ($60 billion), a hair over this year's figure.

Next year there will be a worsening of covered-bond issuer credit quality and a continued deterioration in the sovereingns' financial condition.

Fannie Mae recently told its seller/servicers that all mortgage insurance rescissions, cancellations and claim denials tied to loans it bought must be reported to the agency immediately.

The drop over 3Q11 of commercial and multifamily loans is a credit positive for CMBS, according to Standard & Poor's in a note released this morning.