Income from mortgage production-related activities fell sharply during the third quarter of 2015, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of earnings reports from 13 major companies. And results from mortgage servicing operations were even worse. The 13 lenders reported a combined $1.623 billion in production-related income for the third quarter, a decline of 23.9 percent from the previous period. While all but two of the lenders managed to ... [Includes one data chart]

Mortgage bankers reported a sharp decline in profitability during the third quarter of 2015, including a bottom-line loss on servicing activity, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s quarterly performance report. The average firm’s pretax income was $1.70 million for the third quarter, the MBA said, down 51.4 percent from the previous three-month period. For the year, however, average firm pretax income was up 19.1 percent from the first nine months of 2014 ...

More than two months into the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s integrated disclosure rule, known as TRID, many lenders apparently are still at the mercy of their technology vendors to get fully and finally up to speed. “Our members report that problems and glitches are still prevalent everywhere,” said Rodrigo Alba, senior regulatory counsel at the American Bankers Association, during a webinar this week sponsored by Inside Mortgage Finance, an affiliated publication ...

Ally Financial – which operates mostly as an auto lender now – plans to reenter the residential mortgage space, a move that comes more than three years after the depository threw its Residential Capital subsidiary into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and liquidated its once-massive servicing portfolio. Then again, a quick look at Ally’s balance sheet reveals that it still holds a tidy sum of home mortgages, $7.85 billion in residential first liens and $344 million in junior liens ...

Household growth between 2010 and 2030 will be overwhelmingly nonwhite and half of the net new homeowners over the next 15 years will be Hispanic, according to experts in a forum on demographic changes hosted this week by the Urban Institute. Groups with low “headship” rate (the number of householders who are primary borrowers) and homeownership rates, including Hispanics and other nonwhites, constitute a growing share of the U.S. population ...

President Obama is expected to sign the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill this Friday, which includes several provisions in the Jumpstart GSE Reform Act and prohibits the GSEs from building capital anytime soon. The bill would prevent the Treasury from selling its stock in the GSEs, but would not prevent guaranty fee increases to fund other government spending. A recent twist introduced a sunset provision this week that would limit the prohibition on Treasury sales of GSE stock just for the next two years. Investors Unite, a shareholders trade group, noted that this provision is “effectively locking in the status quo of the flawed conservatorship well into 2017.” Section 702 of the 2,000-plus page omnibus spending bill limits the sale of...

Despite millions of dollars and hours spent on educating consumers about the mortgage process, many still lack the knowledge and understanding of how the process works, results of a new Fannie Mae survey suggest. The survey set out to discover why the homeownership rate remains at a low level (63.7 percent in the third quarter of 2015) despite easing credit standards, a higher employment rate and strong consumer desire to own a home. The online survey of 3,868 respondents found ...

Wells Fargo is close to reaching a $25.75 million settlement of a class-action lawsuit involving delinquent borrowers who were charged fees for property inspections. The settlement would resolve allegations of violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, among other issues. The bank has denied the allegations while noting that it desires to settle the lawsuit to avoid “the burden, expense and uncertainty of continuing litigation.” The lawsuit, Young v. Wells Fargo ...

A significant shift occurred in bank loan modification practices in the third quarter of 2015, according to data from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Major banks’ use of proprietary loan mods declined sharply compared with the previous quarter while the number of Home Affordable Modification Program mods was nearly level in that span. The OCC’s data cover eight banks with a combined $3.73 trillion servicing portfolio, 42 percent of all outstanding first-lien residential mortgages ...

There was a flurry of activity, including a call for an investigation by the Department of Justice of Mortgage Bankers Association President David Stevens and two others, following a Dec. 7 New York Times piece criticizing the Obama administration and MBA for looking to shut down the GSEs. Stevens, along with Michael Berman, a former MBA chair, and Jim Parrott, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, all former government officials turned private-sector employees, each met with housing policy officials at the White House after leaving their government posts, according to a guest log review by the New York Times.