Five years after the subprime mortgage industry imploded, there are signs of a revival as new players are entering the nonprime space. Whats developing is old style home-equity lending, where loan-to-value ratios are rarely larger than 75 percent and the actual funder of the loan keeps the paper in portfolio and services it. In the past two weeks, two subprime residential firms opened their doors for business: Citadel Loan Servicing and Deephaven Mortgage. Deephaven is the brainchild of ...
Nationstar appears to be the winning bidder on the Taylor Bean & Whitaker MSR pacakge. Meanwhile: Ed DeMarco, the most powerful man in mortgage finance today?
Originations of non-agency jumbo mortgages increased by 19.4 percent in 2012 compared with the previous year, according to affiliated publication Inside Mortgage Finance. The sector is expected to continue to grow as jumbos are increasingly attractive for bank portfolios and securitization. An estimated $203.0 billion in non-agency jumbo mortgages were originated in 2012, marking the third straight year of increased production. The sector is driven by big banks ... [Includes one data chart]
FHA funding accounted for 25 percent of home-purchase financing in January, based on the three-month moving average, according to the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey. February numbers will be released shortly.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency is mandating that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac each enter into $30 billion of risk sharing transactions this year and move a little more quickly to reduce their $1.19 trillion of on-balance sheet holdings, including whole loans and non-agency MBS. The edict comes directly from FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco, who provided few details about the initiative during a speech this week to the National Association for Business Economics. DeMarco also announced that the regulator intends to set up a new government entity that will develop and manage the common MBS securitization platform thats been in the works for the two government-sponsored entities. One reason for pushing the GSEs to test drive risk-sharing structures is...
A federal appeals court last week revived a previously dismissed class-action lawsuit against four financial institutions brought by investors that purchased a $1.32 billion offering of MBS that later turned sour. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit vacated and reversed a lower courts decision to dismiss the case two years ago against the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Deutsche Bank AG, Wells Fargo Advisors and NovaStar Mortgage. The New Jersey Carpenters Health Fund was lead plaintiff. In 2007, the New Jersey fund sued...
MBS investors can expect fewer scratches and dents in non-agency MBS portfolios, according to a new analysis from Moodys Investors Service that says houses are less likely to lose value in a recovering market and modified loan recoveries are increasing as borrowers make more payments before re-defaulting. Part of the story is that the market is seeing higher recoveries for defaulted modified mortgages than for unmodified defaulted loans. Even though modifications on loans that were eventually liquidated in 2010 and 2011 exposed the properties to further price depreciation by delaying their liquidation, those modified loans on average still realized higher recoveries than did defaulted unmodified loans, analysts at Moodys said. This is because loan modifications, even failed ones, usually enable...
An investor in Alt A MBS originally issued by Residential Capital Corp. filed suit this week to block Nationstar Mortgage from auctioning nonperforming loans from the MBS pools. Nationstar in mid February began auctioning NPLs on auction.com, according to the complaint filed in the Supreme Court of New York State this week. There are currently two additional auctions totaling some $750 million of NPLs listed on the internet auction site, both believed to be related to Nationstar. The company is...
The majority of the American Securitization Forums board of directors resigned recently and a number of significant members have quit the trade group due to concerns about governance of the ASF and bonuses paid to Tom Deutsch, the groups executive director. The problems stem from the ASFs abrupt separation from the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association in early 2010. The separation and related negotiations from SIFMA have frankly been messier and more difficult than anyone expected, Deutsch said this week, indicating that while the groups separated in 2010 and appeared to operate independently, the split was never quite finished. We look forward to concluding those negotiations with SIFMA in short order and keeping our focus on the key tasks of meeting the looming implementation challenges of the Dodd-Frank Act. SIFMA officials refused...