TRID Projected to Cost $527 Million a Year. A new analysis of the costs of government regulation by Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at the center-right American Action Forum, estimates that the integrated mortgage disclosure rule promulgated last year by the CFPB will cost the industry $527 million annually. The TILA/RESPA integrated disclosure rule – or “TRID” – is scheduled to take effect Aug. 1, 2015, unless the mortgage industry can convince the CFPB to provide a delay. Elsewhere, Batkins projects compliance with all of the bureau’s 2014 regulations to cost the financial services industry $2.1 billion. All of the CFPB’s regulations since its inception in 2011 are estimated to cost $3.6 billion and 38.9 million hours to comply with. Of ...

CFPB Raises TILA Reg Z Exemption Threshold. The CFPB raised the asset size for banks exempt from the requirement to establish an escrow account for higher-priced mortgages under Regulation Z (Truth in Lending Act) from $2.028 billion to $2.060 billion, as of Jan. 1, 2015. The adjustment is based on the 1.1 percent increase in the average of the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) for the 12-month period ending in November 2014. The adjustment to the escrow exemption asset-size threshold will also increase a similar threshold for small-creditor portfolio and balloon-payment qualified mortgages. CFPB Increases HMDA Reg C Exemption Threshold. The bureau slightly ratcheted up the asset- size exemption threshold for financial institutions reporting ...

S&P believes the gap in execution between whole-loan sales and securitization has started to narrow.

However, the VA loan program does not require a downpayment, which is a major attraction for some borrowers.

How much a loan officer earns can be determined by where his/her leads come from.

Since early September, at least 14 mortgage company acquisitions have been announced publicly, according to a database of deals compiled by Inside Mortgage Trends.

The proposed inter-agency rule covers only flood-insurance premium escrows and detached structures.

There was one piece of good news: Freddie Mac managed to boost its share of the GSE market up to 40.6 percent for all of 2014.

The average credit score on the 10th percentile of purchase mortgages increased from 555 in 2000 to 655 at the end of the third quarter of 2014.

New MBS and ABS issuance last year was down 34.4 percent from 2013, largely due to a huge decline in agency single-family MBS production, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. A total of $1.145 trillion of residential MBS and non-mortgage ABS were issued during 2014, the lowest annual production volume since 2000. Last year got off to a very slow start, with just $517.0 billion in new issuance through the first six months of 2014, before gaining pace during the second half. Total issuance fell 4.8 percent from the third to the fourth quarter. Agency MBS remained...[Includes three data charts]