With the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau bringing its considerable weight to bear on e-mortgages as part of a broader push to reinvent the origination process, mortgage lenders and the technology vendors and consultants that serve them have been paying more attention to reconstituting existing processes to support a more digital format. E-signatures play a key role, and perhaps the single most critical component of e-signature technology is user authentication ...
The conversation about the “millennial” generation and its effect on the housing and mortgage markets just isn’t going away. Although some mortgage professionals confess to being sick and tired of hearing about the millennials, they can’t argue that, at 82 million strong, those born between 1980 and 1999 are a home-buying force to be reckoned with. But selling loans to them isn’t always so easy. “These new arrivals to the home-buying scene want to text and email ...
The market for “fix-and-flip” properties is starting to look frothy in certain metropolitan areas, but that isn’t stopping California Capital Real Estate Advisors from moving ahead with its plan to raise $100 million from investors. CalCap has carved out a specialty niche over the past five years of funding developers and contractors in California whose goal is to buy mostly distressed properties on the cheap, fix them and sell them quickly. The privately held nonbank ...
Mortgage lenders that sell loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still focused on delivering single-family mortgages with relatively low credit risk, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of loan-level data from the government-sponsored enterprises. In the second quarter of 2015, 66.4 percent of loans sold to the GSEs had credit scores of 740 or higher. That was up from 64.4 percent in the first quarter and 60.6 percent during ... [Includes one data chart]
A broad sample of 25 publicly traded banks reported strong earnings from their mortgage-banking operations during the second quarter of 2015, a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis reveals. The group, which includes the four megabanks and the major regionals involved in the sector, reported a combined $4.391 billion in mortgage-banking income for the second quarter. That was up 19.6 percent from the first quarter of this year, and it ... [Includes one data chart]
Lenders have slowly loosened underwriting standards since the third quarter of 2013, with the credit expansion largely focused on the agency market, according to a new analysis by the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. Actions by the government-sponsored enterprises and the FHA to address buyback risk appear to have helped prompt lenders to loosen underwriting standards on agency loans. The HFPC’s credit availability index tracks ...
DBRS published proposed criteria this week to rate ABS backed by proceeds from Property Assessed Clean Energy programs. While the Federal Housing Finance Agency continues to place PACE-related prohibitions on mortgages delivered to the government-sponsored enterprises, the rating agency suggested that PACE programs are designed with a number of protections. Comments on the proposed criteria from DBRS are due Sept. 8. The firm would join Kroll Bond Rating Agency in offering ratings on PACE securitizations. KBRA has rated four PACE deals, the first of which was issued in March 2014 and all of which have received AA ratings. The PACE deals rated by KBRA were related...
Over the past few weeks, an unconfirmed rumor was making the rounds that Bank of America would once again begin securitizing newly originated mortgages through Fannie Mae. But a quick check with both parties indicates that the “cold war” between the two isn’t likely to thaw anytime soon. Terry Francisco, a spokesman for BofA said the bank is only selling Home Affordable Refinance Program loans to Fannie. The bank, he noted, discontinued securitizing newly originated non-HARP loans through the government-sponsored enterprise in 2012. According to figures compiled by Inside MBS & ABS, over the past three years almost all of the non-refinance activity between the two has centered...
Heavy refinance activity in the first half of 2015 caused a significant shift in the kinds of single-family MBS produced by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. Issuance of MBS backed by adjustable-rate mortgages has dropped sharply in 2015, and ARMs haven’t had much of a presence for years. ARM MBS production by Fannie and Freddie in the first half of 2015 was down 20.1 percent from a year ago. The drop in Ginnie ARM securitization was less severe, 18.3 percent, but ARMs accounted for an even smaller share of overall production (1.7 percent) at Ginnie than the 2.9 percent share they had in government-sponsored enterprise MBS. Oddly, the heavy refinance market in the first half of 2015 did not appear...[Includes two data tables]
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