Over the past week or so, at least two institutional investors have filed notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission that they no longer own large positions in PHH Corp., the publicly traded nonbank that’s trying to reinvent itself as a subservicing specialist. The two filers are investment banking powerhouse Morgan Stanley – which at one time owned 5.2 percent of PHH – and Hotchkis and Wiley Capital Management, whose stake totaled 8.8 percent. Today, Morgan’s position ...

Organizations representing different segments of the mortgage industry broadly support the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s plan to address the so-called black hole in the integrated disclosure rule under the Truth in Lending Act and Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, or TRID. The black hole refers to situations in which a lender may not use a closing disclosure to reset fee tolerances. This causes closing delays due to fee changes that arise in the origination process ...

Social Finance, the high-flying marketplace lender, has an active mortgage-lending joint venture with Stearns Lending, according to David Schneider, CEO of Stearns. In a recent interview with Inside Mortgage Finance, Schneider said his company “covers a lot of [SoFi’s] business” and buys any loan the joint venture produces. “They do some, and we do some,” Schneider said. He added that Stearns doesn’t service any loans for SoFi. At the recent ABS East conference in Miami, Ashish Jain ...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency wants the government-sponsored enterprises and the Federal Home Loan Banks to hire chief information security officers to head their cybersecurity programs. The new directive was released just after the FHFA Office of Inspector General issued an audit faulting the regulator’s oversight of cybersecurity issues, and in the wake of further revelations about data breaches at Equifax and other large enterprises. The FHFA said Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the ...

Efforts by Congressional Republicans to expand exemptions to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data collection and reporting requirements may or may not succeed. But any lender or aggregator seeking to sell eligible mortgages to the government-sponsored enterprises will still have to get with the program. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continue to tweak their systems and processes to accommodate the new mandates, scheduled to kick in Jan. 1 ...

The Trump administration has proposed to cancel $16 billion of the National Flood Insurance Program’s existing debt in addition to other legislative proposals to boost the program’s ability to meet its obligations while remaining viable as a major provider of flood insurance to mortgagors. A political fight could erupt over the proposals, observers say. In a letter to Vice President Michael Pence, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney sought legislative reforms that would place the ...

Federal regulators and industry analysts raised concerns that defaults would spike once pre-crisis home-equity lines of credit hit their amortization periods. Those fears didn’t come to pass as vintage HELOCs have performed well, thanks to home-price appreciation and low interest rates. Pre-crisis HELOCs typically had interest-only periods for the first 10 years then switch to fully amortizing or required a full payment as part of a balloon feature. According to a 2015 report by the Office of the Currency ...

“I’m not sure why there’s been such an escalation of it [the FCA],” said Carson.

A slowdown in new scratch-and-dent deals proved to be a drag on non-agency MBS issuance during the third quarter, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside MBS & ABS. Total non-agency MBS production fell to $10.99 billion in the third quarter of 2017, a 29.9 percent decline from the previous period. It was the slowest quarter of 2017, although year-to-date production was still up 14.1 percent from the first nine months of 2016. The major factor was ... [Includes two data charts]

The Treasury Department released a report late last week calling for a variety of regulatory reforms for the MBS and ABS markets. Many of the reforms aim to increase issuance and are likely to come into effect, particularly those that don’t require action by Congress. The recommendations were part of a response to an executive order issued by President Trump calling for regulators to identify actions to be taken to align financial regulations with “core principles” established by ...