In late December, issuers of new non-agency MBS will become subject to new risk-retention requirements. It’s not clear whether anyone will notice. The vast majority of loans securitized in jumbo MBS over the past few years meet the qualified-mortgage standard. And because federal regulators opted to synchronize the QM standard with the separate qualified residential-mortgage standard, jumbo MBS backed entirely by QMs will be exempt from the 5 percent risk-retention requirement. When the final rule came out, Redwood Trust backed...

There is one GSE issue that Democrats and Republicans see eye-to-eye on: capping the pay of CEOs working for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The Highway Trust Fund reauthorization includes language that would raise GSE guaranty fees in five years.

The privately held Citadel will continue to service the underlying loans.

Agency multifamily MBS issuance dropped more steeply, by 19.7 percent, but that was from the record $30.91 billion issued during the second quarter of this year.

There was some good news from Ocwen: the company earned $44.2 million from servicing sales...

The younger generation appears ready to take the plunge into the housing market, but finding an affordable home and gaining access to credit remain the top challenges, especially when it comes to African-Americans and Latinos, according to some experts. Mark Fleming, chief economist with First American, sponsor of a housing forum on Capitol Hill this week, said the way mortgage credit is formulated today doesn’t necessarily fit the type of ethnically diverse, millennial borrower of the future. “Ethnically diverse communities tend...

Many independent mortgage companies that are relatively new to the mortgage servicing market are actively managing their portfolios in a constantly shifting environment, according to panelists at the annual convention of the Mortgage Bankers Association. The surprisingly cheap cost of retaining mortgage servicing rights during the 2012 bonanza led a number of nonbank lenders to start amassing MSR portfolios. It has become a valuable tool in managing cash flow and earnings in the volatile mortgage production market of recent years. Guild Mortgage is...

There is widespread agreement that any substantive legislative remedy for the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac won’t begin to happen until after the 2016 elections – if then – but lawmakers on Capitol Hill may manage to push through some minor adjustments in this Congress. The most likely legislation to pass would have an impact on just two individuals, the CEOs of Fannie and Freddie, who received sizable pay hikes early this year. In the Senate, S. 2036, the Equity in Government Compensation Act of 2015 would require the Federal Housing Finance Agency to suspend those compensation packages and roll them back to $600,000, their previous level. The bill was co-sponsored...

Lender anxiety tied to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s crackdown on marketing services agreements is reaching a new fever pitch these days, while spreading to other sectors of the housing finance industry, namely home builders and Realtors. Industry officials interviewed by Inside Mortgage Finance over the past two weeks said title insurance affiliates owned by Realtors and home builders are a particular area of concern – namely pushing customers into using service providers in which they have an ownership stake. “I’ll tell...