Concerns that rising interest rates will prompt current homeowners to stay in place are overblown, according to a number of industry analysts. A panel at Zillow’s latest housing forum this week focused on the issue of borrower lock-in, with most speakers downplaying the issue. Joseph Tracy, an executive vice president and senior advisor to the president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said his research has found that rising interest rates ...

Industry trade groups are lining up to express their dismay at a recent audit issued by the Inspector General of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which said both good and bad things about the risk nonbanks and small lenders pose to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The latest trade group missive was issued late this week by the Community Home Lenders Association: “By implication, the IG report seems to be pushing for more loans to be done at the big TBTF [too big to fail] banks by stating that small nonbank lenders are riskier for the enterprises and with little or no evidence to support the claim.”

Lenders facing rising interest rates might be overlooking valuable hedging options, according to officials at Mortgage Capital Management. The firm offers pipeline risk-management services and is touting float-down locks, or put options on interest rates, which MCM claims will increase earnings stability and grow production. A float-down lock allows a borrower to receive a lower interest rate on their mortgage if rates decline between when ...

Black Knight Financial Services – with a little help from its friends at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage – has repurposed some of its existing technology and combined it with some fresh capabilities to help lenders cope with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s TILA/RESPA integrated disclosure rule. It also will enable mortgage lenders to automate the numerous multi-party processes required to close a loan these days, the company said. The new ...

Fannie Mae has priced its fourth and largest risk-sharing transaction to date, a more than $2 billion offering pegged to a pool of mortgages acquired last year, the GSE announced last week. The $2.05 billion note is the GSE’s third transaction under its Connecticut Avenue Securities series issued this year. Last year, the Federal Housing Finance Agency ordered both Fannie and Freddie Mac to shrink their role in the U.S. housing market. The latest offering – Series 2014-C03 – included reference loans with original loan-to-value ratios of up to 97 percent and “is consistent with prior transactions.”

Trying to find out how much money an individual mortgage company spends each year in marketing its products to consumers is no easy task. A quick survey of some of the nation’s largest lenders on advertising dollars conducted by Inside Mortgage Trends yielded the same exact response: “We don’t disclose that information.” Many large lenders don’t even engage in specific mortgage-related advertising, at least not on a national level. The one exception is ...

New mortgage insurance eligibility rules proposed earlier this month by the Federal Housing Finance Agency appear likely to cause some MIs to tweak their corporate structures and/or to raise additional capital, note industry observers. In its draft Private Mortgage Insurer Eligibility Requirements, the FHFA directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to revise, expand and align their risk management requirements for mortgage insurance counterparties.The updated financial requirements incorporate a new, risk-based framework that ensures that approved insurers have a sufficient level of liquid assets from which to pay claims.

Critic: CFPB Regulations Ensure Fannie, Freddie Market Dominance. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, through its scores of regulations, has stifled and discouraged mortgage market growth away from the GSEs, a critic of the bureau noted during the CFPB’s third anniversary last week. “One of the important effects of the CFPB has been to ensure the continuing market dominance of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the way they have written their mortgage regulations, which give you a pass if you make a loan eligible for sale to Fannie or Freddie or give you very onerous legal risks if you don’t,” said Alex Pollock, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Mortgage lenders generally earned more on their servicing operations than on production activity during the first quarter of 2014, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of earnings reports from firms that disclose such information. The 10 companies in the sample group reported a combined $850.4 million in production-related income during the first three months of 2014, compared with $1.33 billion in servicing income ... [Includes one data chart]

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in June rebounded from a decline the previous month with a big boost in the volume of single-family mortgages securitized by the two GSEs, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. Fannie and Freddie issued $51.6 billion in single-family mortgage-backed securities in June, a 15.2 percent jump from the previous month. Year-to-date MBS issuance was down 60.9 percent from the same period a year ago.