Usually, the winter isn’t the best time to be looking for a job in the mortgage industry, especially if you happen to be a loan officer facing the dead months of December through February. But thanks to the recent downdraft in interest rates – and some hope that lending outside the qualified mortgage bucket will start to grow – the immediate outlook for mortgage employment isn’t so bad after all. According to figures compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, mortgage brokerage firms added 1,700 workers during September, one of the best hiring sprees in some time. Compared to the same month a year ago, employment is up by 400 positions to 73,000. Mortgage banking firms, which are listed under the BLS ...

Freedom Mortgage recently broke into the top 10 ranking of mortgage originators and doesn’t look to be stopping there. Through the first nine months of 2014, Freedom produced $16.4 billion in originations, a 28.5 percent increase over the same period last year. That’s a huge increase at a time when overall mortgage origination volume dropped a whopping 44.2 percent. Last week, Freedom announced a deal to acquire Continental Home Loans, a retail lender focused on the New York metro market. Freedom officials said the deal, structured as an asset acquisition transaction, will boost its monthly production volume to $2 billion. That would raise the firm a notch or two in the rankings. Beefing up its retail presence was one reason ...

Mortgage delinquency rates kept falling across the country in the third quarter of the year, according to data provided by the Mortgage Bankers Association, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The delinquency rate for mortgages on one- to four-unit residential properties declined 19 basis points, on a seasonally adjusted basis, to 5.85 percent of all loans outstanding as of Sept. 30, 2014, according to the MBA. This is the lowest level seen since the fourth quarter of 2007 and represents the sixth straight quarterly decrease, according to the trade group. In terms of product mix, the seasonally adjusted delinquency rate slipped 15 bps to 3.05 percent for prime fixed loans and decreased 45 bps to 4.83 percent for prime adjustable-rate mortgages. ...

Mortgage-banking income reported by a diverse group of 33 lenders fell 16.0 percent from the second quarter of 2014 to the third, according to a new analysis by Inside Mortgage Trends. The 33 publicly traded companies, which include most of the top originators and servicers in the industry, had a combined $3.547 billion in net mortgage banking income during the third quarter. That was only 12.0 percent above the dreary $3.166 billion the group earned during the first three months of 2014, which was one of the industry’s least profitable quarters ever. The tepid third-quarter results came at a time when origination volume was unexpectedly strong – up 36.7 percent from the first quarter of 2014 – and many lenders have put ...

Loan Banks jumped 22.0 percent to $627 million in the third quarter of 2014, up from $514 million in the second quarter, according to the Federal Home Loan Bank Office of Finance. The increase resulted primarily from increases in non-interest income and net interest income, partially offset by an increase in non-interest expense, explained the Office of Finance. However, net income declined 8.2 percent compared to the first nine months of last year.

Ohio Court Sides With Freddie in Pre-Crisis Shareholder Lawsuit. An Ohio federal court late last week tossed out a shareholder class action lawsuit that accused Freddie Mac of lying about its exposure to subprime loans prior to the 2008 financial crisis. The suit, filed in 2008 by the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, claimed that Freddie artificially inflated the value of its common stock by making false public financial statements that obscured its subprime exposure.OPERS claimed it lost as much as $27.2 million as a result of Freddie’s alleged cover-up of its subprime exposure.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reported a combined $6.0 billion in net income for the third quarter of 2014, up from $5.1 billion in the previous quarter. The two GSEs will send to the Treasury $6.8 billion as return on the government’s senior preferred stock. That will bring cumulative payments under the GSE conservatorships to $225.5 billion. Fannie and Freddie were given a total of $187.4 billion in government funds in order to stay in business.

Look for the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s new guidelines for loans with loan-to-values between 95 percent and 97 percent to take into account “compensating factors” to offset reduced borrower equity. In a speech last week at the National Association of Realtors conference in New Orleans, FHFA Director Mel Watt elaborated only a little further on the agency’s recently announced mortgage guidelines, noting they will include safety and soundness standards to best manage the GSEs’ risk.

The Mortgage Bankers Association is calling on the Federal Housing Finance Agency to direct Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to review “and if appropriate” adopt new validated credit score models and allow for the use of alternative methods of scoring. In a letter last week to FHFA Director Mel Watt, the MBA said that, through this action, the Finance Agency could directly increase the number of borrowers eligible for conventional mortgages.

After a year of looking, the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced last week it has finally picked a chief executive to run the fledgling Common Securitization Solutions: industry veteran David Applegate, who has a long resume in mortgage banking. Applegate led both GMAC Mortgage and GMAC Bank during a 17-year career at General Motors Acceptance Corp He also worked at mortgage insurer Radian Guaranty. Applegate’s last job title was president and chief executive officer of Homeward Residential, Dallas, a mortgage-banking firm.