Complaints filed against mortgage firms have declined by more than a quarter over the past year. Bank of America Corp. saw the biggest improvement, while Nationstar Mortgage LLC had the steepest incline.
Mortgage borrowers filed 11,282 complaints with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from Jan. 1 through the end of last month.
That was a 26 percent improvement for the real estate finance sector compared to the three months ended March 31, 2013.
But the year-over-year improvement wasn’t universal among mortgage companies that had at least 100 complaints filed against them during the three-month period either this year or last year.
At Nationstar Mortgage, the number of complaints was up 84 percent from the first quarter of last year to 1,081 in the first-quarter 2014.
Most of Nationstar’s complaints were about servicing. However, the rise in complaints was proportional to its servicing portfolio, which grew 88 percent from the end of 2012 through the end of 2013.
Complaints against Select Portfolio Servicing Inc. soared 71 percent to 292.
A 67 increase in complaints left Green Tree Servicing LLC’s total at 546 for the first quarter of this year and landed M&T Bank at 100.
Bayview Loan Servicing LLC’s complaints rose 55 percent to 104.
The biggest decline was registered by Bank of America, where complaints plunged 68 percent to 1,566. BofA’s total mortgage servicing portfolio fell 42 percent from the end of 2012 to the end of last year.
Complaints retreated 63 percent at OneWest Bank to just 52.
Wells Fargo had a 41 percent decline in complaints to 1,376. The improvement is even more impressive when considering that its managed servicing portfolio was down just 3 percent between March 31 of last year and the end of last month.
Declines of roughly a third were reported for Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, SunTrust Bank and Flagstar Bank.
Ocwen had the most complaints during the first quarter of this year: 1,730.
The CFPB data indicated that complaints about loan modifications, collection or foreclosure sank 44 percent on a year-over-year basis.
The decline in this category of complaints likely reflects a corresponding drop in loan modifications, which fell 48 percent between February 2013 and February 2014, and new foreclosure filings, which retreated 21 percent between the first quarter of last year and the first-quarter 2014.
On the flip side, complaints about loan servicing, payments and escrow accounts have worsened by 28 percent.
The transfer of mortgage servicing rights on hundreds of billions of dollars in home loans during the past year has likely influenced this number.
