The latest mortgage lender sentiment survey from Fannie Mae finds that industry leaders are paying increasing attention to enhancing the borrower experience, thanks to competitive market pressures. To what degree they can actually pull that off remains to be seen. Doug Duncan, senior vice president and chief economist for the government-sponsored enterprise, noted in an online post that the company’s previous survey found that senior mortgage executives were worried ...
Independent mortgage bankers are leading all other lenders in providing mortgage loans to first-time homebuyers, minorities, lower-income borrowers and rural areas, and yet they are more regulated than banks, according to a new industry report. The report from the Community Home Lenders Association underscores the fact that IMBs are small businesses that don’t have access to federally insured deposits. It claims that IMBs have done a better job of servicing home loans ...
Over the past few weeks, two $100 million-plus transactions involving mortgage technology companies have been announced, signaling that more activity may be ahead in the space as residential finance moves toward the digital age. “This is an interesting time,” said consultant Jeff Lebowitz, a former Fannie Mae executive who has been tracking tech changes for two-plus decades. “There’s a paradigm shift going on. Outside guys are coming in, thinking there’s big changes ahead for ...
Mortgage-banking profits improved dramatically during the second quarter as production volume surged and servicing held its own, according to data reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Participants in the group’s quarterly mortgage-banking performance study reported average pretax income of $2.12 million for the second quarter. That was up handsomely from the average $886,000 companies earned in the first three months of the year. Profits weren’t as strong as they were ...
Interest rates offered for mortgages generally track with pricing for the loans in the secondary market. However, new research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that lenders offer worse pricing to borrowers when demand for loans is relatively strong. The findings were detailed in a working paper authored by Andreas Fuster, Stephanie Lo and Paul Willen. Fuster and Willen are in research departments at Fed banks, while Lo is currently a ...
A handful of large banks continued to retreat from the business of servicing home loans for other investors during the second quarter of 2017, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call reports. Commercial banks and savings institutions reported that they serviced $3.627 trillion of residential mortgages for other investors, typically mortgage-backed securities trusts, as of the end of June. That was down just 0.4 percent from the previous period ... [Includes one data chart]
A former employee of Standard & Poor’s Rating Services beat fraud charges alleging she loosened S&P’s rating methodology for commercial MBS to generate business for her employer. However, she was found liable of the lesser charge of negligence for failing to disclose the change. In his initial Aug. 29 decision, Administrative Law Judge James Grimes of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s administrative court said that while Barbara Duka did change the firm’s rating methodology for CMBS, he found no evidence that she intended to manipulate, deceive or defraud investors. Rather, Duka, manager of S&P’s CMBS rating group, did...
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