A handful of firms say they are still aggressively recruiting residential loan officers who have a solid background in purchase-money lending – that is, sales professionals with deep ties to Realtors and home builders.
Also note that the ATR rule provides additional flexibility to small lenders in that the safe harbor has been expanded to 3.5 percent over the average prime offer rate.
After months of investor uncertainty and occasional hand-wringing, it has begun – the “tapering,” that is. This week, the Federal Reserve announced that it would scale back the growth in its agency MBS portfolio from $40 billion a month to $35 billion a month, starting in January. The central bank said it would continue to reinvest principal payments from its huge agency MBS portfolio, which was up to $1.483 trillion at the last official reading. With new production in the agency MBS market falling dramatically since April, the Fed’s target...
Analysts forecast uncertainty for the agency MBS market going into 2014 as the policy landscape reshapes itself and investors cautiously adapt to the shape of things to come. Look for 2014 to be a “year of transition” amid a slowly rising range of U.S. Treasury yields, a slowly recovering economy, and a Federal Reserve that transitions away from quantitative easing toward forward guidance, according to RBS analysts. RBS noted...
While the jumbo MBS market has all but ground to a halt in recent months, industry analysts expect that issuance will resume at some point early next year, but the 2014 forecast is dicey. Some $12.23 billion in jumbo MBS was issued through three quarters in 2013. The market hasn’t seen much activity in the final months of the year due to a lack of demand from investors and continued appetite from bank portfolios. A number of industry analysts expect...
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