The Federal Housing Finance Agency continues to mull over the decision on whether to ban captive insurance firms owned by real estate investment trusts from the system. The agency received 1,300 comment letters on the controversial proposal and Mel Watt, FHFA’s director, was vague last week on when a final decision would be made. “FHFA is continuing to evaluate the comments we received and we will come to a resolution as quickly as we can prudently do so,” he said during the Federal Home Loan Banks Directors Conference in Washington. Last year, Watt raised safety and soundness concerns about captive insurers borrowing and joining the FHLB system. Some regulators are concerned that REITs and other financial...

Although the trial between the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Nomura Holdings is over, Nomura said that it is planning an appeal. The Japanese-based investment bank was found financially liable last week when Federal Judge Denise Cote ruled the bank knowingly sold bad mortgage-backed securities to the GSEs ahead of the 2008 financial crisis. The FHFA is working to put a dollar amount on the damages that Nomura and RBS Securities, the underwriter of four of the seven securitizations at issue, should pay. Nomura spokesman Jonathan Hodgkinson, said in a statement that losses by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac resulted from an unprecedented decline in home prices. However, that defense approach failed. According to Cote “given the magnitude of falsity, it’s not surprising that the defendant...

U.S. Mortgage Insurers Supports GSE Risk-Sharing. The USMI wrote a letter this week to Sen. Richard Shelby, R-AL, in support of Shelby’s regulatory relief bill, which calls on the GSEs to engage in front-end risk sharing transactions. “This directive would make greater use of private capital to “de-risk” the GSEs, lower the exposure and costs for the enterprises and taxpayers and should lower costs to borrowers,” the trade group said. Fannie Names Winning Bidders of First NPL Sale. Fannie Mae unveiled the winning bidders on its first-ever sale of non-performing mortgages last week: SW Sponsor LLC and PRMF Acquisition, the latter of which is an affiliate of Neuberger Berman Fixed Income Funds. The GSE...

Investor appetite for buying and flipping residential houses appears to have eased in April, and Texas may be partially to blame, according to Auction.com’s 2015 Real Estate Investor Activity Report for April. In April, there were fewer investors looking to flip their house purchase: 50.4 percent, down from 53.5 percent for the first quarter of 2015, the report noted. The percentage of investors planning to hold the residential property and rent it out grew to 48.3 percent last month from 44.8 percent in the first quarter.Although there was strong preference among investors in live auctions for flipping over hold-to-rent in states where Auction.com conducts live bidding, there was less enthusiasm for it in Texas, the report noted. The Lone ...

Economists at the Federal Housing Finance Agency published a paper last week detailing a model that could be a better gauge of how low house prices can fall than models used before the financial crisis.“Leveraging a model based upon consumer and investor incentives, we are able to explain the depth of housing market downturns at both the national and state level over a variety of market environments,” the economists said. The economists noted that their model is dynamic, which is more useful than the static models used by the predecessor to the FHFA, which “proved insufficiently stressful in the lead up to the Great Recession.” A model based on a static shock can produce an insufficient level of stress ...

The real estate industry is excited about the potential use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones in marketing residential and commercial properties. But stakeholders might have to wait a bit more until federal regulations for drone usage are clear and precise. Industry participants across the country are eager to use drones for aerial photography, videography, property inspection and appraisal and for other mortgage-related opportunities UAV technology might bring. Sometime in the not-so-distant future, Realtors will be able to legally fly unmanned drones over listed properties to give prospective buyers a total view of each listed property and its surroundings. For appraisers and catastrophic insurers, drones can reduce the time it takes to provide an appraisal for a residential or ...

Commercial banks and thrifts earned $3.99 billion from their mortgage-banking operations during the first quarter of 2015, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Mortgage Trends. Mortgage-banking income was up 12.7 percent from the previous quarter and 19.0 percent ahead of the pace set in the first three months of 2014. Early 2015 was no record-setter, by any means, but profits were well below the levels reached in the middle of last year. The call-report data do not separate...[Includes one data table]

A dramatic disconnect has surfaced between different segments of the mortgage industry when it comes to being prepared to comply with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s pending integrated-disclosure rule. Professionals in the land title insurance side of the business are far more confident about their readiness than are depository institutions, recent surveys reveal. A survey conducted in April by the American Land Title Association found that 92 percent of respondents indicated their company will be prepared to implement the new loan estimate and closing disclosures and to comply with the CFPB’s regulation. That number isn’t as good as it seems, though. A much smaller 62.6 percent said they are on schedule for implementation. Another 29.4 percent conceded they are behind ...

Mortgage originations are already off to a better start in 2015, and industry economists are predicting, on average, a 15 percent increase from last year’s sluggish output. But uncertain prospects in the housing market point toward a decline in mortgage originations next year, according to forecasters at the secondary market conference sponsored this week by the Mortgage Bankers Association. 2015 should bring the strongest housing sales volume since 2007, said Leonard Kiefer, deputy chief economist at Freddie Mac. Sales activity was decent over the winter, despite severe weather in many areas, but the market has yet to get back to normal. Freddie looks...[Includes one data table]

Seven months ago, a fledgling nonprime lender called Deephaven Mortgage unveiled a $300 million investment in the firm by a global “alternative” hedge fund called Varde Partners, Minneapolis. But since then, not much has been heard about Deephaven. Then again, it might be said that the “new” nonprime industry is still trying to figure out how to operate in a world of tight regulation, non-QM lending and a securitization market that doesn’t want to touch its product. Matt Nichols, the former Goldman Sachs managing director who formed Deephaven two years ago, did not respond...