The Federal Housing Finance Agency this week detailed its efforts to make sure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac policies and practices are consistent enough to keep prepayments speeds on their to-be-announced securities essentially the same. Prepay speeds for the two government-sponsored enterprises have moved significantly closer as more of their products and program requirements have been standardized, the FHFA said in an update on its single security initiative. Keeping them that way is seen as critical to the success of the program, in which Fannie and Freddie TBA MBS will be fully fungible – and can even be combined in so-called second-tier securitizations. Some industry interests have urged...
Issuers considering including a deal agent in new non-agency MBS will have to look to investors to pay up for the feature as there won’t be much of a rating benefit, according to Fitch Ratings. Some investors have been pushing for a deal agent that would have oversight of various participants in the transaction along with a fiduciary duty to investors. Broad outlines for deal agent responsibilities have been established, but details regarding compensation remain uncertain. Some issuers, including Redwood Trust, have indicated...
Verizon Wireless is preparing to package the payment plans on more than 3.09 million cell phones into an ABS, marking the first time an ABS in the U.S. will be backed by such collateral. The planned $1.17 billion Verizon Owner Trust 2016-1 received preliminary AAA ratings from Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s. “It’s the most interesting type of consumer ABS product we’ve seen in a long time,” said Darrell Wheeler, head of research for global structured finance at S&P. “And obviously, with the amount of phones in the market today, it has a lot of potential.” Analysts at Moody’s Investors Service noted...
Marketplace lender Social Finance is contemplating a securitization of jumbo mortgages, according to industry officials who claim to have knowledge of the firm’s operations. The news comes amid an interesting time for the jumbo loan market: production volumes are generally strong and likely will be boosted even more by the recent decline in interest rates. But even established nonbank players have been avoiding the securitization route, opting instead to sell newly originated jumbos to commercial banks. SoFi, as the privately held company is known, has been placing...
The concerns among participants in the jumbo MBS market regarding the TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule might have been much ado about nothing. A new report from Moody’s Investors Service suggests that TRID violations won’t materially increase losses in jumbo MBS. The rating service said third-party due diligence reviews will identify loans in violation of TRID, and lenders and aggregators will be able to cure many TRID violations before the mortgages are placed in jumbo MBS. Three jumbo MBS have included...
A new fund has been created to encourage investments in the dwindling supply of single-family and multifamily affordable-housing options. Ten banks have contributed to the $25 million Community Development Fund since it opened in February. The fund will invest primarily in securities issued or guaranteed by the U.S. government or its agencies, and other investment grade fixed-income securities. In normal circumstances, the fund plans to invest at least 90 percent of its net assets in debt securities and other debt instruments that the fund’s advisor deems would qualify under the Community Reinvestment Act. Ken Thomas, president of Community Development Fund Advisors in Miami, set up...
Recently, rumors were making the rounds in Washington that Fannie and Freddie might be pondering an increase in their net worth minimums for seller/servicers...
Mortgage lenders delivered a hefty $218.29 billion of single-family mortgages into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities during the second quarter of 2016, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of MBS disclosures made by the two government-sponsored enterprises. That was an increase of $45.32 billion over the first quarter, and 30.2 percent of the gain came from California, where total GSE loan sales jumped ... [Includes two data charts]
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