REITs Continue to Join FHLBs. American Capital is the latest captive insurer mortgage real estate investment trust to join a FHLB. It announced in April that it joined the FHLB of Des Moines. A spokesman for the FHFA said that there has been no movement as of yet on the proposed ban to prevent REITS from gaining membership. Freddie Mac Announced Standard Pool Offering. Last week Freddie announced an upcoming auction of a $233 million standard pool offering of delinquent loans. The loans are offered as a single pool of geographically diverse deeply delinquent non-performing loans that are currently being serviced by Ocwen. Bids....

It’s not clear whether thousands of other – much smaller – mortgage servicers grew enough to offset the decline in the top tier.

PennyMac Financial Services also originated $8.9 billion of home mortgages in 1Q, an 11.3 percent increase compared to the previous quarter.

Two Harbors is developing a network of lenders that will sell MSR assets to the company on a flow basis.

Like Freddie Mac, Fannie cautioned that future earnings will be lower because of the company’s mandate to shrink.

The legislation would provide a temporary transitional license and give loan originators 120 days to pass testing standards...

Most firms report the earnings/loss figure in the first or second paragraph of their press release, but not Stonegate Mortgage.

The overall size of the single-family mortgage servicing market isn’t changing much, but the dynamics of the business continued to shift in early 2015, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis and ranking. The Federal Reserve won’t provide an official reading on single-family mortgage debt outstanding as of the end of the first quarter for another month or so, but the data point to little or no growth in the market during early 2015. Mortgage originations were...[Includes two data charts]

Thanks to the recent uptick in interest rates, the value of mortgage servicing rights is on the rise again, which should pave the way for a busy spring and early summer for investment bankers who play in the space. “Prices are holding up pretty well,” said Mark Garland, president of MountainView Servicing Group, Denver. “Prepayment speeds increased in March, but April speeds have come down a bit.” According to Garland, buyers of receivables are paying...

Freddie Mac will send $746 million to the U.S. Treasury under the conservatorship plan that siphons off nearly all the government-sponsored enterprise’s net profit every quarter, but that’s not all the cash being milked from the GSE. During the first quarter of 2015, Freddie sent $219 million to Treasury under the 2011 law that squeezed the GSEs to pay for a continuation of a payroll tax cut for U.S. workers. The levy is 10 basis points of guaranty fee charged by Freddie and Fannie Mae, and it’s a steadily rising amount as a greater share of GSE business is subject to the charge. In the first quarter of last year, Freddie paid...