A handful of large nonbank servicers have expanded aggressively over the past decade by hiring cheap, back-office workers overseas, but don’t tell that to the nation’s largest subservicer, Cenlar FSB. The Ewing, NJ-based firm has no plans whatsoever to outsource its workforce to foreign lands. “We’ve looked at it for a number of years,” said Cenlar Executive Vice President of Business Development Dave Miller. “But it’s not something we felt comfortable with.” Will Cenlar ever change its ...
While mortgage lenders have been using traditional forms of data, like credit reports, to make their lending decisions, the Federal Trade Commission is concerned that “big data” will make it easier for banks to unfairly discriminate against certain segments of the population. Anytime big data is used to categorize consumers in ways that can result in certain populations being put at a disadvantage for things like a mortgage, it becomes a tool for exclusion, the FTC warned ...
At yearend, JPM held $157.1 billion of what it calls “prime mortgages” (including option ARMs), a stunning 48 percent increase over the past 12 months.
The volume of home loans with private mortgage insurance that were securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dropped 17.1 percent from the third to the fourth quarter of last year, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis and ranking. That’s not so bad, given that total mortgage-backed securities production by the two government-sponsored enterprises was down 19.9 percent during the last three months of 2015. The GSEs securitized ... [Includes two data charts]
Although residential production increased by roughly 30 percent in 2015 over the year prior, investors beat down nonbank mortgage stocks with a vengeance as continued low interest rates forced huge markdowns on the value of servicing rights. According to an analysis of eight publicly traded nonbank lender-servicers by Inside Mortgage Finance, the stock prices of these firms are currently trading at steep discounts to their 52-week highs, with most a dollar or two above their lows. ...