Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are getting more business in the so-called conforming-jumbo market this year, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis of mortgage-backed securities data.Through the first six months of 2015, the two GSEs securitized $39.44 billion of home loans that exceed $417,000, the maximum loan amount in areas that are not designated high-cost markets. That figure, including only mortgages for one-unit properties, was up 112.5 percent from the first half of 2014, about double the 55.8 percent growth rate in total Fannie/Freddie business over that period. Conforming-jumbo loans accounted for 9.6 percent of total GSE business on single-unit properties in the first half of this year, compared to 7.1 percent for the first six months of 2014.
Ginnie Mae said new MBS issuers need to gain some experience in the agency’s program before they are allowed to do servicing transfers, but some newly approved issuers have attempted to do so. Roy Hormuth, director of single-family securitization at Ginnie Mae, said there has been some misconception among new issuers about doing a co-issuance program in their first month in the Ginnie program despite the fact that they are not ready for it. New issuers must first demonstrate that they can successfully manage the servicing themselves before they can transfer servicing immediately, he said. In a co-issuance transaction, a company sells...
The Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General released a report this week that found that the housing finance examiner program is not on track to produce commissioned examiners qualified enough to lead major risk sections of GSE examinations. “We found evidence indicating that the housing finance examiner program was not on track to meet its central objective,” said the report. In fact, only one of the 66 enrolled examiners had shown paperwork proving that he successfully completed the required on-the- job training assignments during 2014 and early 2015. “Further, FHFA records indicated that a considerable of minority enrolled examiners, more than 20 percent, completed no more than one fo the required 16 course,” said the report.
In preparation for more risk sharing, including its first actual-loss transaction, Fannie Mae released an updated, more detailed single-family loan performance dataset last week to provide more transparency to the market. The GSE plans to move away from fixed severity deals to an actual-loss framework for its Connecticut Avenue Securities risk-sharing deals as early as the fourth quarter of 2015.The enhanced dataset will include credit performance up to and including property disposition, including credit event dates, costs incurred and Fannie’s recovery proceeds. Until now, Fannie risk-sharing transactions used pre-set loss severity schedules to determine investor loss exposure.Laurel Davis, vice president for credit risk transfer at Fannie, said the GSE is providing access to the data now in order to give the market...
California generated more than twice as many home loans that carried some form of primary mortgage insurance than any other state, but relatively few loans there are actually insured, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis. A total of $45.45 billion of insured California loans were securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae during the first six months of 2015. Second-place Texas had less than half that amount, $20.15 billion ... [Includes one data chart]
With the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau bringing its considerable weight to bear on e-mortgages as part of a broader push to reinvent the origination process, mortgage lenders and the technology vendors and consultants that serve them have been paying more attention to reconstituting existing processes to support a more digital format. E-signatures play a key role, and perhaps the single most critical component of e-signature technology is user authentication ...
The conversation about the “millennial” generation and its effect on the housing and mortgage markets just isn’t going away. Although some mortgage professionals confess to being sick and tired of hearing about the millennials, they can’t argue that, at 82 million strong, those born between 1980 and 1999 are a home-buying force to be reckoned with. But selling loans to them isn’t always so easy. “These new arrivals to the home-buying scene want to text and email ...
The market for “fix-and-flip” properties is starting to look frothy in certain metropolitan areas, but that isn’t stopping California Capital Real Estate Advisors from moving ahead with its plan to raise $100 million from investors. CalCap has carved out a specialty niche over the past five years of funding developers and contractors in California whose goal is to buy mostly distressed properties on the cheap, fix them and sell them quickly. The privately held nonbank ...
Mortgage lenders that sell loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still focused on delivering single-family mortgages with relatively low credit risk, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of loan-level data from the government-sponsored enterprises. In the second quarter of 2015, 66.4 percent of loans sold to the GSEs had credit scores of 740 or higher. That was up from 64.4 percent in the first quarter and 60.6 percent during ... [Includes one data chart]