The secondary market in agency mortgage servicing rights cooled off in the first quarter of 2017 after a hectic end to 2016, according to an exclusive analysis and ranking by Inside Mortgage Trends. A total of $109.78 billion of agency MSR changed hands during the first three months of the year, down 32.9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2016. Part of that was due to a 26.2 percent decline in new business volume at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie ... [Includes three data charts]

And now the obvious questions becomes: where does Ocwen go from here? The company can’t possibly be sold because of all the outstanding lawsuits and “legacy” problems...

The Structured Finance Industry Group is worried that the Credit Competition Score Act of 2017 could result in an excessive number of approaches to credit scoring. Rep. Ed Royce, R-CA, introduced H.R. 898 in February with Reps. Kyrsten Sinema, D-AZ, and Terri Sewell, D-AL. The bill lets...

Fannie Prices Fourth Multifamily DUS. Fannie Mae priced its fourth Multifamily DUS REMIC in 2017 totaling $855.8 million under its Fannie Mae Guaranteed Multifamily Structures program on April 11, 2017. Josh Seiff, Fannie’s vice president of capital markets and trading, said the GSE kicked off the second quarter with a $900 million 10-year GeMS deal, which built on the first quarter’s $3.1 billion in issuance. “The investor market has been...

The Federal Home Loan Bank of New York settled a lawsuit with Lehman Brothers last week stemming from claims the bank undervalued interest rate swaps in 2008. In Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. v. Federal Home Loan Bank of New York, documents show that the bank will pay $70 million to the Lehman bankruptcy estate. A recent FHLBank of NY filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency said it increased the number of minority and women-owned businesses it awarded contracts to in 2016. But several obstacles make expanding its business with MWOBs complicated. The agency recently released its annual report to Congress, which details initiatives and accomplishments during the year to increase diversity and inclusion. This year’s report also mentioned a diversity and inclusion program to examine the same practices within Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks. In 2016, the FHFA expanded...

DLJ Mortgage Capital, an arm of Credit Suisse, was the winning bidder of all four pools of Fannie Mae’s second reperforming loan sale transaction. The GSE announced the result last week and noted that the deal included 7,508 loans totaling $1.62 billion in unpaid principal balance. The deal, announced on March 14, was...

Ed DeMarco, former acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, was named the new president of the Financial Services Roundtable’s Housing Policy Center last week. HPC, a proponent of housing finance reform, has called the current framework “unsustainable.” DeMarco took FHFA’s reins in 2009, shortly after the start of the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He then left the FHFA after a five-year stint and became a senior fellow in residence at the Milken Institute’s Center for Financial Markets. Prior to his time at FHFA, he was...

Freddie Mac introduced a curriculum to help potential manufactured homebuyers in Kentucky get a mortgage and is now looking to increase lender participation in the program. The GSE partnered with Next Step Network, a housing intermediary based in Louisville, and three nonprofit housing counseling agencies to create the online education curriculum aimed at better preparing Kentucky homebuyers with blemished credit histories. Since the initiative was rolled out...

Despite various rumblings suggesting that a plan may be in the works, the Trump administration appears to have no current plan for reforming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Speaking on a housing affordability panel sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute earlier this month, Mark Calabria, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief economist, said the administration may even go with the Corker-Warner GSE reform plan put forth by Senators Bob Corker, R-TN, and Mark Warner, D-VA. Calabria, former director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, got...