In the wake of the mammoth study of mortgage disclosures released in mid-June by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the real estate industry is actively analyzing the new forms and the FTC's conclusions about what needs changing. But the opinions on the study and what it could mean for RESPA reform are unsurprisingly varied. Paul Schieber of Blank Rome LLP perhaps said it best when he observed, "To be honest, any new form is probably going to be an improvement, but no form will satisfy everyone."
At the end of May, the real estate world was rocked when HUD filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against several major real estate firms and a natural hazard disclosure reporting company alleging RESPA violations in connection with their former joint ventures.
Although at the time, the industry speculated this lawsuit marked new ground for HUD in taking companies to court over RESPA violations, HUD has in fact done it once before. And curiously, the issues in that first case bear an uncanny similarity to the issues at the heart of the new case.