The Federal Housing Finance Agency said it has settled one of its numerous lawsuits against non-agency mortgage-backed securities issuers for misrepresenting deals that were sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the mortgage market collapse.

Despite the bad press and the elimination of the standard fixed-rate reverse mortgage product from the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage program, reverse mortgages will continue to thrive simply because people grow old, former Ginnie Mae chief Joe Murin told Inside FHA Lending.

Lenders One, the nation’s largest mortgage cooperative, is telling its members they need to get their Fannie Mae servicing approvals by the end of January to be eligible for discounts under an affinity deal it has with the GSE.

Most securities issuers and investors who attended this week’s American Securitization Forum ASF 2013 conference in Las Vegas were optimistic about the market. “We are seeing demand that we have not seen in years,” said Michael Binz, a managing director and business leader of North America ABS at Standard & Poor’s. Binz noted that the mood at the conference a year ago was starkly different, with fewer investors, diminishing supply and regulatory uncertainty. About 5,660 people registered to attend the conference this year, up from 5,000 last year, according to Tom Deutsch, executive director of the ASF. Deutsch noted...

Mortgage banking income increased at a faster rate than did secondary market sales during the third quarter of 2012. Huge gain-on-sale margins pushed the industry to its most profitable quarter, according to an analysis of call report numbers by Inside Mortgage Trends.

Envoy Mortgage, a privately held nonbank, is the latest lender to jump into the correspondent lending arena. On Wednesday the firm issued a statement saying it has hired two industry veterans – Dan Hastings and Todd Cheney – to build and run the new division. Formed in 1997, Envoy has been a retail-only lender funding in 48 states… Plus other mortgage news briefs.

Bank of America, which is in the process of selling roughly $308 billion worth of mortgage servicing rights, recently trimmed its servicing staff by at least 700 workers...

After including a significant amount of ARMs in its first issuance of the year, the second non-agency jumbo mortgage-backed security of 2013 from Redwood Trust will consist largely of 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, according to a new presale report released by Kroll Bond Rating Agency.

Redwood Trust is set to issue its second non-agency jumbo MBS of the year, a $666.13 million security, according to a presale report released today by Kroll Bond Rating Agency. The MBS will largely consist of 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, with 51.4 percent of the originations from First Republic Bank. Plus other mortgage news briefs.

Fannie Mae is ending the practice of assigning different guaranty-fee discounts to the various “affinity groups” or cooperatives that pool mortgages for sale into the secondary market, Inside Mortgage Finance has learned.