Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have implemented a new appraisal sharing feature in the Uniform Collateral Data Portal to help correspondent lenders. When it launches Feb. 7, correspondent lenders will be able to share appraisal information with their aggregators within the portal so they can get real-time results for their correspondents’ appraisals. The GSEs said this ensures that they will have the most up-to-date appraisal information when selling a loan to aggregators.The correspondent will be able to share individual appraisals with specific aggregators and delve into more details when they retrieve the appraisal. The aggregator can access the status, funding and submission summary report for the correspondent-shared appraisals.

Redwood Trust, which a few years back branched out into buying GSE loans, announced this week that it was throwing in the towel on that business, cutting 25 percent of its workforce in the process.Although it will no longer buy Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages from correspondent originators, it will remain a buyer of jumbo product. As one source close to the company noted: Redwood “just couldn’t make the math work” in that line of business. At Sept. 30, the publicly traded real estate investment trust employed 221 full-time workers. The layoff will claim roughly 54 jobs, most of them in Denver where its GSE acquisition initiative was based.

Trade groups concerned about privacy violations in the proposed collection of data in the National Survey of Existing Mortgage Borrowers voiced their concerns to the Federal Housing Finance Agency last week. The FHFA has been seeking comments on the proposed voluntary survey of borrowers who have a first mortgage loan secured by a single-family home. Everything from the borrower’s name and address to financial records, mortgage and credit card information and race and household composition will be addressed in the approximately 80-question survey. While the 10 trade groups, including the American Bankers Association, Housing Policy Council, Independent Bankers of America and Mortgage Bankers Association, agree with...

There is also a school of thought that going forward, loan officers won’t be needed as much because of new origination technologies...

The first security backed by proceeds from properties that have “rent-to-own” agreements has caused some divergence among rating services. Home Partners of America is preparing to issue a $508.88 million deal, which received preliminary AAA ratings from two firms. Moody’s Investors Service and Morningstar Credit Ratings issued presale reports on Home Partners of America 2016-1 last week. Kroll Bond Rating Agency followed with a warning that rent-to-own deals present more risks than single-family rental securitizations. The collateral for the security is...

MBS backed by multifamily mortgage loans would be exempt from a proposed rule that would establish margining requirements for multifamily agency finance. Had it been implemented as originally proposed, the rule would have amended the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s Rule 4210 to establish margin requirements in the single-family “to-be-announced” (TBA) market. At the same time, it would have also scoped in the multifamily housing programs of Fannie Mae and FHA/Ginnie Mae, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. FINRA filed...

Goldman Sachs last week announced it has agreed to a $5.1 billion settlement, the largest regulatory penalty in the firm’s history, concluding an investigation brought by the Residential MBS Working Group of the U.S. Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. The agreement in principle is poised to resolve actual and potential civil claims by the U.S. Department of Justice, the New York and Illinois attorneys general, the National Credit Union Administration (as conservator for several failed credit unions) and the Federal Home Loan Banks of Chicago and Seattle. At issue are...

The average daily trading volume for agency MBS fell to a yearly low of $149.2 billion in December, as trading desks from coast to coast continued to assess how to make money in what’s become a business of tight profit margins. Late this week, Barclays Bank unveiled a massive restructuring of its MBS and whole-loan trading business, cutting the number of employees in the division – including traders – down to 50 from roughly 100. As a structural matter, the bank is moving...

The Ginnie Mae market was the most active of the three, with an estimated $112.6 billion in MSR sales through the first 11 months of 2015.

Four of the top five ABS issuers in 2015 were closely linked to the auto industry, including the most productive issuer in the market, Ford Motor Credit.