Correspondent lenders generated 32.1 percent of the home loans securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae during the second quarter of 2015. More than either other channel, correspondents excelled at finding homebuyer borrowers, 51.9 percent of their second-quarter production, while refinance loans accounted for 56.5 percent of total agency business. Heavy purchase-mortgage volume meant correspondent loans had lower ... [Includes one data chart]

The housing market showed the signs of a typical seasonal slowdown in August, according to results from the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey. While purchase-mortgage lending could soften in the coming months, the home purchase market looks stronger than it was a year ago. Tom Popik, research director of Campbell Surveys, said comments from a number of real estate agents across the country suggest that the housing market ...

Credit standards appear to be easing more than they have in the past few years in both the government-sponsored enterprise market and non-GSE lending, according to Fannie Mae’s most recent lender survey. Medium and large-sized lenders both reported a notable easing of credit standards for the first time in seven quarters. The gap between lenders reporting easing as opposed to tightening over the second quarter increased to 20 percentage points for ...

For investors in mortgage servicing rights, the regulatory focus seems to have shifted somewhat from documentation issues involving servicing transfers to a reliance on subservicers. At the ABS East conference produced by Information Management Network last week in Miami, Michael Drayne, a senior vice president of the office of issuer and portfolio management at Ginnie Mae, said 90 percent of the issuer applicants to Ginnie in the last three years planned to ...

It’s not every day – or every year, for that matter – that a nonbank purchases a federally insured depository. But it happened this month in Arizona. Well, sort of. This month, Kent Wiechert, owner and president of Westar Mortgage, Albuquerque, NM, closed on his purchase of Goldwater Bank, NA, a full-service bank with roughly $100 million in assets. The investment – no purchase price was disclosed – was a personal transaction entered into by Wiechert, but since he controls both ...

Officials in the mortgage industry continue to obsess about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s pending integrated disclosure rule, but perhaps they should be paying closer attention to complying with the CFPB’s existing mortgage origination and servicing rules, a top bureau official suggested this week. Speaking at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s 2015 regulatory compliance conference in Washington, DC, Peggy Twohig, assistant director for supervision policy ...

Mortgage banking income rose substantially in the second quarter of 2015 mostly because lenders sold more loans in the secondary market, but the outlook for the second half of the year is murkier. Commercial banks and thrifts sold $198.64 billion of home loans during the second quarter, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data. That was up 19.9 percent from the first three months of the year, and it represented the busiest ... [Includes one data chart]

Freddie Mac will be the first to use the Common Securitization Platform but the implementation date won’t be released until sometime in 2016, said the Federal Housing Finance Agency in a recent announcement. David Applegate, CEO of Common Securitization Solutions, the joint venture owned by Freddie and Fannie Mae, recently revealed that a large portion of the work has been completed to reach a major milestone in its progress. Applegate said at last week’s ABS East conference in Miami that CSS has completed about 90 percent of the work required for single-class security issuance by Freddie on the CSP. However, in an update detailing the progress in developing the CSP software, the FHFA stopped short of pinpointing a definite timeline and said...

About 30 industry trade groups recently called for Congress to refrain from using GSE guaranty fees as a source of funding for highway programs or any other purposes beyond supporting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The letter, addressed to House Speaker John Boehner, R-OH, as well as leaders Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, Mitch McConnell, R-KY, and Harry Reid, D-NV, aims to prevent the government from tapping g-fees to pay for pet projects. G-fees, used by Fannie and Freddie to protect against losses from loans that default, are a “critical risk management tool,” according to the trade groups who say that increasing g-fees for other purposes imposes an unjustified burden on the housing finance system.

It has been a full year since the Federal Housing Finance Agency proposed sweeping changes to the Federal Home Loan Bank membership rules and the agency said as recently as this week that the proposal remains under review. With the membership rules up in the air, last week the American Bankers Association penned a letter to the Senate urging that it adopt legislation requiring the FHFA to withdraw the proposal. In September 2014, the FHFA proposed changes that would require members to hold 10 percent of their assets in residential mortgages on an “ongoing” basis and ban captive entities from the definition of insurance companies. The revised asset test was especially controversial among community banks.