A wide range of mortgage industry participants cautioned the Federal Housing Finance Agency that increasing the guaranty fees charged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac won’t necessarily prompt an increase in non-agency activity. In June, the FHFA solicited public input about what g-fee level would prompt investors in non-agency mortgage-backed securities to find it profitable to enter the market or prompt banks to hold conforming-balance mortgages in portfolio. “Policymakers should not assume that increases in g-fees alone will lead to a significant increase in private-label securities issuance,” said the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, which stressed that a number of factors beyond the pricing of agency mortgages are limiting non-agency activity.
The few real estate investment trusts that currently have access to advances from the Federal Home Loan Banks would lose their ability to tap the attractive funding source under a proposal last week from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The FHFA said the proposed rule is necessary because REITs with captive insurance companies pose risks to the FHLBank system. “FHFA is taking these actions to address supervisory concerns about certain institutions that are ineligible for FHLBank membership, but that are using captive insurers as vehicles through which they can obtain FHLBank advances to fund their business operations,” the federal regulator said.
Officials at the Securities and Exchange Commission see the final rule on disclosures recently issued by the federal regulator as bringing major changes to the non-agency mortgage-backed security market. However, whether issuers will offer non-agency MBS subject to the disclosure requirements is largely in the hands of investors that have been willing to buy securities not subject to the SEC’s standards. Beginning in 2017, issuers of publically registered non-agency MBS will have to disclose 270 data points, mostly at loan level. The disclosure requirements in the SEC’s Reg AB2 rule do not apply to 144A offerings, although some observers expect the SEC eventually to extend them to private placements.
Credit Suisse issued its latest jumbo mortgage-backed security at the end of August, a $404.62 million deal with originations from a wide range of lenders. CSMC Trust 2014-WIN1 was also structured in a more complex manner than most of the jumbo MBS issued in recent years. More than 30 lenders contributed to the deal, led by New Penn Financial with a 23.1 percent share, EverBank Financial (20.3 percent) and Quicken Loans (19.8 percent). The deal included two pools of fixed-rate loans. The pool backed primarily by 30-year mortgages accounted for 80.8 percent and a pool of 15-year mortgages made up the rest.
Redwood Trust’s planned $329.95 million jumbo mortgage-backed security is the second straight MBS from the issuer to have adequate geographic diversity, according to Fitch Ratings. Almost every jumbo MBS issued since 2010 has taken a hit from default expectations and had higher credit enhancement because of geographic concentration. Sequoia Mortgage Trust 2014-3 is scheduled to be issued around Sept. 19. Fitch, Kroll Bond Rating Agency and Moody’s Investors Service gave the deal preliminary triple-A ratings with credit enhancement of 6.55 percent on the top-rated tranche. The credit enhancement level is one of the lowest in recent years on jumbo MBS backed by 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. It is particularly low considering that due diligence was completed on less than 100 percent of the loans, and the MBS will include two loans that do not meet standards for qualified mortgages.
Six years after the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the former regulator of the government-sponsored enterprises noted that the housing finance system has made “significant progress.” But even as critical structural changes are underway, comprehensive improvement is still several years out. In a policy paper issued last week, Edward DeMarco – new senior fellow-in-residence for the Milken Institute’s Center for Financial Markets – said that house prices, as measured by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have recovered more than 50 percent since their decline in 2007. “While the damage from the housing crisis has been substantial, we are finally seeing...
The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s “single security” proposal for generic Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac MBS is “well-thought out” and “worthy of serious consideration,” but the agency should pick up the pace in its implementation to avoid making the solution part of the problem, according to a paper by the Urban Institute. Laurie Goodman, director of the UI’s Housing Policy Center, and Lewis Ranieri, chairman of Ranieri Partners, expressed concern that the FHFA “may be contemplating a slower pace in the project than it warrants.” The FHFA last month issued...
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