One of the largest players in the "new" nonprime mortgage industry is Citadel Loan Servicing, Irvine, CA, which now has a portfolio totaling $600 million.

Banks reported a drop in mortgage-banking income during the second quarter of 2016, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of earnings reports from 26 major public companies. But virtually all of the decline came from the four too-big-to-fail banks with over $1 trillion in assets, while regionals posted a substantial increase in mortgage-banking profits. As a group, the 26 banks earned $3.12 billion from mortgage banking during ... [Includes one data chart]

Lenders and servicers are seen as prime targets for cyber criminals that focus on Social Security numbers and bank accounts. Bill Beckmann, president and CEO of MERSCORP, said, “There’s almost nothing more robust” than the information mortgage companies have regarding individual borrowers. Beckmann and Mitch Tanenbaum, a partner at CyberCecurity, a consultant to financial service companies, addressed cyber security issues facing the mortgage industry ...

Panorama Point Partners this summer participated in what it calls a “significant” capital raise for Alterra Home Loans, a Las Vegas-based nonbank started by Hispanic-Americans that’s been on a production tear the past four years, growing originations by upwards of 250 percent every 12 months. If all goes well, AHL hopes to fund $1.3 billion of residential mortgages in 2016, 70 percent of it to minorities, a large chunk of them Hispanics. In short, Alterra sees gold in ...

Most lenders welcome mortgage technology and innovation, but they are divided when it comes to embracing Uber-like industry-wide disruptions, according to new research from Fannie Mae’s Economic & Strategic Research Group. “Today’s consumers access myriad products and services via digital platforms that make it more efficient, simple and pleasant to conduct their business,” said Katrina Jones, vice president of single-family business solutions at ...

Officials at a number of lenders that have significantly increased their business in recent years point to efforts regarding corporate culture as a key factor in the companies’ success. Kurt Reisig, the founder of American Pacific Mortgage, a retail-only lender, said that since starting an effort to focus on corporate culture, APM has doubled its origination volume in the past two years and went from 800 employees to more than 2,000. “Culture eats strategy for lunch every day,” ...

The dramatic expansion of the credit box for loans sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the first quarter of this year held steady in the second quarter, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of mortgage-backed securities data. In the first quarter, the share of purchase loans sold to the government-sponsored enterprises with credit scores ranging from 620 to 699 jumped by nearly 7 percentage points to 21.4 percent. The low-score share ... [Includes one data chart]

In the next year or so, a changing environment will remain the norm in the mortgage industry, where participants can expect impending interest-rate increases, new product offerings, increasing competition, new servicing business models, and continued regulatory scrutiny, according to a new PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) study. To address flat production volume and shrinking margins, lenders will need to cross-sell products, and concentrate on reducing ...

GSE guaranty fees more than doubled from 2011 to 2015, increasing from an average of 26 basis points in 2011 to 56 basis points in 2015, according to a new report published this week. That sharp increase has prompted trade and community groups to lobby for lower fees. However, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt said this week that the current charges “strike the right balance, between safety and soundness and liquidity in the housing finance market,” according to a reply letter he sent to the Center for Responsible Lenders, Mortgage Bankers Association and a host of others seeking a fee reduction. In the FHFA’s annual report to Congress on guaranty fees...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency concluded that adding a question about a borrower’s language preference on its updated Uniform Residential Loan Application form was probably not a good idea after all, at least for now. The URLA is an industry-standard loan application that has remained pretty much the same for the last two decades. The FHFA is charged with finalizing the redesigned application this summer to give lenders adequate time to prepare for the new form in January 2018.In an attempt to recognize the growing numbers of non-English speakers, the FHFA considered adding a question about the borrower’s primary language.