“By limiting the volume of securities that private investors will have to absorb as we reduce our holdings, the caps should guard against outsized moves in interest rates and other potential market strains,” said Fed Chairman Janet Yellen.

The betting is that Bruce Berkowitz and Fairholme plan to ride out their GSE investment to the very end.

The banking industry retreated a little further from the business of servicing mortgages for other investors during the first quarter of 2017, although a change in reporting requirements made the change look a little bigger than it really was. A new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of bank call reports shows that commercial banks and savings institutions serviced a total of $3.640 trillion of home mortgages for other investors, typically mortgage-backed securities trusts. These are mortgage servicing rights that the bank owns; in some cases a third party may perform the actual servicing and in others the bank may provide subservicing on MSR it doesn’t own. The March servicing-for-others figure was...[Includes one data table]

Profit margins and net income fell sharply in the mortgage banking business during early 2017, according to new data from the Mortgage Bankers Association. On average, firms participating in the MBA’s quarterly performance report earned just $886,000 in pretax income during the first quarter, a hefty 74.8 percent drop from the previous period. Only about two firms in three (67.0 percent) managed to report net pretax income for the first three months of the year. The industry funded...

The spring and summer home-buying season is in full throttle and with rates falling to yearly lows, mortgage bankers should be hiring in droves. Right? Not necessarily. Top-ranked lenders such as Quicken Loans and Movement Mortgage report they continue to search for new talent, but others are being careful about their hiring plans. Employment in the mortgage brokerage sector has been...

There are three important trends in the consumer complaint space, each bearing important lessons for mortgage lenders, regardless of size or structure, according to top compliance experts. Speaking to an audience at the American Bankers Association’s annual regulatory compliance conference in Orlando earlier this week, Carol Hunley, deputy chief compliance officer at Ally Financial Services, detailed each of them and their significance for lender compliance. First, the lending environment is...

First-time homebuyers have fueled a surge in home sales in the last two years, and the trend is continuing into 2017, according to a new report on the first-time homebuyer market from Genworth Mortgage Insurance. The report focused on mortgage origination data from more than 20 million first-time homebuyers over the past 24 years, with some interesting findings. Approximately 85 percent of the overall increase in home sales over the past two years was...

During his confirmation hearing in March, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta said he favored raising the exemption threshold but only up to $33,000.

Fun fact: Ginnie Mae servicing now represents 16.5 percent of all residential debt outstanding – more than triple the program’s market share at the end of 2008.