In a move designed to allow qualifying members to sell fixed-rate, conforming mortgage loans into the secondary market, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Seattle announced last week it has joined the Mortgage Partnership Finance Program and is now offering the MPF Xtra product.Under the MPF Xtra program, loans are sold to the FHLBank of Chicago and are concurrently sold to Fannie Mae as a third-party investor.

While Congress drafts and debates different legislative remedies to GSE reform that could take at least two years to materialize, regulators and administration officials can, and must, begin to act now to implement a mortgage finance solution, the head of the Mortgage Bankers Association said this week. At a press briefing, MBA President and Chief Executive Officer David Stevens rolled out the trade group’s five-point plan – “Key Steps on the Road to GSE Reform” – that could be immediately implemented by the Federal Housing Finance Agency and/or by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac without the need for authorizing legislation and without disrupting the housing finance system. “Given the recent market recovery, some worry that if the status quo were to change, lenders could end up being in a worse position and lose some of the parity gained,” said Stevens. “We believe these steps are extremely important to support a competitive, robust and sustainable housing finance system regardless of the ultimate path taken by policymakers in Washington.”

A Manhattan federal judge earlier this month dismissed a class-action lawsuit against Standard & Poor’s Financial Services after finding no evidence that the rating agency defrauded investors when it gave a favorable rating to Fannie Mae stock prior to the financial crisis.The suit, filed in December 2012 on behalf of potentially hundreds of thousands of investors who bought stock in an offering by Fannie in May 2008, four months before the GSE was taken over by the government, alleged that S&P knowingly misrated Fannie’s stock. Valued at about $25 per share when it was issued, the stock dropped to about $3 per share after Fannie’s government conservatorship began in September 2008.

Most banks that have reported second-quarter earnings said their mortgage banking income declined from the first three months of 2013, but profitability remained strong, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of corporate disclosures. A group of 15 banks that includes most of the top depository institutions in the mortgage business reported a combined $6.72 billion in mortgage banking income during the second quarter of 2013. That was up 5.0 percent from the earnings ... [Includes one data chart]

Consumer complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau about their residential mortgages fell to 12,531 during the second quarter, down 9.2 percent from the first three months of the year, according to an analysis of the bureau’s complaint database by Inside the CFPB, an affiliated publication. That rate of decline is better than the overall 8.2 percent drop in complaints seen across all financial services product lines in aggregate, but not as good as the declines related to ...

Many mortgage lenders make a stab at getting consumer feedback, but more often than not seem to end up with limited success, at best. The StratMor Group, a mortgage banking consultancy, and CFI Group, an analytics and technology firm, are helping lender clients find success in obtaining direct borrower feedback 24 hours, seven days a week, with their MortgageSAT service where others have been finding failure. MortgageSAT is a turnkey solution to providing real-time borrower feedback to mortgage companies ...

You would think that a bank with a small presence in mortgages would jump at the opportunity to keep the fast-growing residential arm of a merger partner. But that’s not the case with MF Financial, a mid-sized bank that earlier in the week announced that it would buy Taylor Capital, parent of Cole Taylor Bank, in a stock deal valued at $680 million. Although MF Financial took a close look at the subsidiary, Cole Taylor Mortgage, it decided that the unit is not essential to the deal. In fact, it’s so non-essential ...

With interest rates increasing, some new borrowers have turned to adjustable-rate mortgages. Industry analysts expect the ARM share of originations will increase, but limited product offerings and tight underwriting standards will likely prevent the ARM originations from reaching levels seen during the previous mortgage boom. The record low interest rates on fixed-rate mortgages in recent years have given borrowers few reasons to take ARMs. Interest rates on mortgages have increased significantly recently ...

While new regulations have been costly for servicers to implement, they have helped improve borrower satisfaction, according to J.D. Power’s latest primary servicer satisfaction study. “The fact that satisfaction continues to increase seems to indicate that changes being made in response to these new regulations are having a positive impact on the experience of customers,” said Craig Martin, director of investment services at J.D. Power. He cited regulations from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ...

Negative home equity is not an important barrier for a homeowner to decide to move elsewhere for a better job, although underwater homeowners are probably more likely to move than borrowers with equity in their homes, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. The study presents evidence debunking the theory that homes with underwater mortgages deter unemployed people from moving to get new jobs. The “lock-in” theory holds that unemployed people with negative equity could ...