Mortgage bankers reported a sharp decline in profitability during the third quarter of 2015, including a bottom-line loss on servicing activity, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s quarterly performance report. The average firm’s pretax income was $1.70 million for the third quarter, the MBA said, down 51.4 percent from the previous three-month period. For the year, however, average firm pretax income was up 19.1 percent from the first nine months of 2014 ...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency gave Fannie Mac and Freddie Mac their marching orders for 2016 by releasing its annual objectives late this week. Increasing access to credit, more risk sharing and continued work on building a new single security are among the primary goals for the year.As credit risk transfers continue to evolve, the FHFA said the GSEs should be transferring credit risk on a minimum of 90 percent of the unpaid principal balance of newly acquired single-family mortgages in loan categories targeted for risk transfer. For 2016, those targets include non-Home Affordable Refinance Programs, fixed-rate terms greater than 20 years, and loan-to-value ratios above 60 percent.

More than two months into the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s integrated disclosure rule, known as TRID, many lenders apparently are still at the mercy of their technology vendors to get fully and finally up to speed. “Our members report that problems and glitches are still prevalent everywhere,” said Rodrigo Alba, senior regulatory counsel at the American Bankers Association, during a webinar this week sponsored by Inside Mortgage Finance, an affiliated publication ...

A new Inside The GSEs analysis reveals that seller repurchases of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages fell to an all-time low during the third quarter as the industry continued to move beyond the havoc caused by pre-crash lending excess. Fannie and Freddie reported combined repurchases or other indemnification related to $434.2 million of home loans backing their mortgage-backed securities during the third quarter. That was down just 0.5 percent from the second quarter, but it was the lowest total since the GSEs began filing repurchase disclosures with the Securities and Exchange Commission back in early 2012. The GSEs also reported all-time lows in their inventory of pending and disputed buyback...

Ally Financial – which operates mostly as an auto lender now – plans to reenter the residential mortgage space, a move that comes more than three years after the depository threw its Residential Capital subsidiary into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and liquidated its once-massive servicing portfolio. Then again, a quick look at Ally’s balance sheet reveals that it still holds a tidy sum of home mortgages, $7.85 billion in residential first liens and $344 million in junior liens ...

Household growth between 2010 and 2030 will be overwhelmingly nonwhite and half of the net new homeowners over the next 15 years will be Hispanic, according to experts in a forum on demographic changes hosted this week by the Urban Institute. Groups with low “headship” rate (the number of householders who are primary borrowers) and homeownership rates, including Hispanics and other nonwhites, constitute a growing share of the U.S. population ...

President Obama is expected to sign the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill this Friday, which includes several provisions in the Jumpstart GSE Reform Act and prohibits the GSEs from building capital anytime soon. The bill would prevent the Treasury from selling its stock in the GSEs, but would not prevent guaranty fee increases to fund other government spending. A recent twist introduced a sunset provision this week that would limit the prohibition on Treasury sales of GSE stock just for the next two years. Investors Unite, a shareholders trade group, noted that this provision is “effectively locking in the status quo of the flawed conservatorship well into 2017.” Section 702 of the 2,000-plus page omnibus spending bill limits the sale of...

Despite millions of dollars and hours spent on educating consumers about the mortgage process, many still lack the knowledge and understanding of how the process works, results of a new Fannie Mae survey suggest. The survey set out to discover why the homeownership rate remains at a low level (63.7 percent in the third quarter of 2015) despite easing credit standards, a higher employment rate and strong consumer desire to own a home. The online survey of 3,868 respondents found ...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is tackling duty-to-serve rulemaking, several years after being mandated by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, and issued a proposed rule this week that could expand the GSEs’ role in manufactured housing loans, affordable housing preservation and mortgages funded in underserved rural areas. FHFA is seeking comments on the proposed rule to implement duty-to-serve and its focus on making sure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are serving markets that have traditionally been underserved. The manufactured housing industry is one of those underserved markets where leaders have been asking for more clarity. “In developing the proposed rule, the FHFA tried to strike a balance between the requirements...

As an increasing share of “baby boomer” mortgage executives reach retirement age over the next few years, there’s a growing concern about a talent “brain drain” from the industry. But rest assured, there’s still plenty of senior managers who plan on working well past the standard retirement age of 65. “The retirement rate of 10,000 people [baby boomers] per day may be applicable to the general population, but I do not think it is applicable to the mortgage banking industry,” said Larry Charbonneau ...