The letter is meant to counteract correspondence sent earlier in the week to Watt from 10 trade organizations and community groups that want the GSEs to build capital...
According to figures compiled by Inside Mortgage Finance, Caliber ranks 13th among originators, based on first quarter figures and 17th among servicers.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, wants the Federal Housing Finance Agency to delay any decision regarding contesting homeowner association foreclosures that will extinguish Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac rights under controversial state super-lien laws. Warren, who co-signed a letter to FHFA Director Mel Watt in May with Sen. Edward Markey, D-MA, and eight Massachusetts lawmakers, wants the FHFA to first solicit public comments on the potential change in policy. Under super-lien laws in 22 states, including Massachusetts, and the District of Columbia community associations are given...
First Mortgage Corp., a privately-held mortgage company based in Ontario, CA, and six executives have agreed to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission $12.7 million to resolve charges they concocted a scheme to defraud investors in Ginnie Mae MBS, the SEC announced this week. According to the SEC’s complaint, from March 2011 through March 2015, FMC repurchased current loans from Ginnie pools that it claimed were delinquent. FMC bought...
Increased securitization of purchase-money mortgages provided the lift for a pickup in the production of new single-family MBS by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae in May, according to a new market analysis and ranking by Inside MBS & ABS. The three agencies produced a total of $114.71 billion of new single-family MBS last month, a 5.3 percent increase from April’s volume. May was the third straight month of increased production and it just barely exceeded the $113.56 billion issued during the same period a year ago. For the first five months of 2016, production was down 2.8 percent from last year. Purchase mortgages accounted...[Includes two data tables]
Mortgage servicers appeared to have received some protections in November when amendments to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act were signed into law. However, the rule proposed by the Federal Communications Commission to implement the amendments contravenes the law, according to one FCC commissioner. The TCPA allows for one errant call to a cell phone number that hasn’t provided consent before liabilities under the law are triggered. The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015 amended...
Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase recently launched programs to deliver low-downpayment mortgages to Fannie Mae that differ from the government-sponsored enterprises’ recent expansion into high loan-to-value financing. Both banks introduced new 97 percent LTV programs they believe are easier to use than the GSE initiatives and, for certain borrowers, a better choice than FHA financing. Wells Fargo’s “yourFirstMortgage” requires a minimum of 3 percent downpayment for fixed-rate mortgages. The company will consider FICO scores significantly lower than other similar high-LTV programs, to as low as 620, along with debt-to-income ratios up to 45 percent. Factoring in nontraditional uses of credit such as rent, utility bill payments and tuition is...
Wells Fargo, the nation’s top-ranked mortgage lender, appears to have escaped unscathed from the scrutiny the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau directed toward a former loan officer, an investigation which resulted in an $85,000 fine and a one-year ban from working in the mortgage industry. Last week, the CFPB announced a consent order with David Eghbali, formerly an LO for Wells’ Wilshire Crescent branch in Beverly Hills, CA, from November 2007 through July 2015. The bureau accused him of referring a substantial number of loan closings to a single escrow company, New Millennium Escrow, Inc., which allegedly shifted its fees from some customers to others at his request. “In exchange for the flexibility to shift fees from some loans to others, respondent [Eghbali] referred...
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