The conversation about the “millennial” generation and its effect on the housing and mortgage markets just isn’t going away. Although some mortgage professionals confess to being sick and tired of hearing about the millennials, they can’t argue that, at 82 million strong, those born between 1980 and 1999 are a home-buying force to be reckoned with. But selling loans to them isn’t always so easy. “These new arrivals to the home-buying scene want to text and email ...

With the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau bringing its considerable weight to bear on e-mortgages as part of a broader push to reinvent the origination process, mortgage lenders and the technology vendors and consultants that serve them have been paying more attention to reconstituting existing processes to support a more digital format. E-signatures play a key role, and perhaps the single most critical component of e-signature technology is user authentication ...

California generated more than twice as many home loans that carried some form of primary mortgage insurance than any other state, but relatively few loans there are actually insured, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis. A total of $45.45 billion of insured California loans were securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae during the first six months of 2015. Second-place Texas had less than half that amount, $20.15 billion ... [Includes one data chart]

In preparation for more risk sharing, including its first actual-loss transaction, Fannie Mae released an updated, more detailed single-family loan performance dataset last week to provide more transparency to the market. The GSE plans to move away from fixed severity deals to an actual-loss framework for its Connecticut Avenue Securities risk-sharing deals as early as the fourth quarter of 2015.The enhanced dataset will include credit performance up to and including property disposition, including credit event dates, costs incurred and Fannie’s recovery proceeds. Until now, Fannie risk-sharing transactions used pre-set loss severity schedules to determine investor loss exposure.Laurel Davis, vice president for credit risk transfer at Fannie, said the GSE is providing access to the data now in order to give the market...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General released a report this week that found that the housing finance examiner program is not on track to produce commissioned examiners qualified enough to lead major risk sections of GSE examinations. “We found evidence indicating that the housing finance examiner program was not on track to meet its central objective,” said the report. In fact, only one of the 66 enrolled examiners had shown paperwork proving that he successfully completed the required on-the- job training assignments during 2014 and early 2015. “Further, FHFA records indicated that a considerable of minority enrolled examiners, more than 20 percent, completed no more than one fo the required 16 course,” said the report.

“Of course, there are no guarantees, and all of our announced sales may not close as we currently envision,” said Ocwen's Ron Faris.

ARM MBS production by Fannie and Freddie in the first half of 2015 was down 20.1 percent from a year ago.

Stop the office renovations? The CFPB may be unconstitutional after all...

Heavy refinance activity in the first half of 2015 caused a significant shift in the kinds of single-family MBS produced by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. Issuance of MBS backed by adjustable-rate mortgages has dropped sharply in 2015, and ARMs haven’t had much of a presence for years. ARM MBS production by Fannie and Freddie in the first half of 2015 was down 20.1 percent from a year ago. The drop in Ginnie ARM securitization was less severe, 18.3 percent, but ARMs accounted for an even smaller share of overall production (1.7 percent) at Ginnie than the 2.9 percent share they had in government-sponsored enterprise MBS. Oddly, the heavy refinance market in the first half of 2015 did not appear...[Includes two data tables]

The U.S. Court of Federal Claims ordered the Department of the Treasury to release all discovery documents pertaining to the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last week in connection with one of the shareholder lawsuits challenging the government’s seizure of earnings generated by the two government-sponsored enterprises. The ruling in Fairholme Funds v. The United States prevents the Treasury from withholding documents it argued are privileged and designated as “protected information.” The shareholders said...