Expect GSE reform to remain a key focus of Congress following the mid-term election Republican takeover of the Senate and vast expansion in its House majority. However, industry observers warn that it remains to be seen whether focus will translate into legislative action during the 114th Congress as the new leadership structure remains in flux.

The GSE risk-sharing market is building momentum and investors indicate there is a growing demand for this product going forward, industry insiders told attendees of an Urban Institute/CoreLogic housing forum last week. In its most recent strategic plan for the GSEs, the Federal Housing Finance Agency is calling on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to reduce their exposure to risk by tripling the amount of credit-risk transfers they conduct on their single-family business from $30 billion last year to $90 billion in 2014.

After a year of looking, the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced last week it has finally picked a chief executive to run the fledgling Common Securitization Solutions: industry veteran David Applegate, who has a long resume in mortgage banking. Applegate led both GMAC Mortgage and GMAC Bank during a 17-year career at General Motors Acceptance Corp He also worked at mortgage insurer Radian Guaranty. Applegate’s last job title was president and chief executive officer of Homeward Residential, Dallas, a mortgage-banking firm.

Look for the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s new guidelines for loans with loan-to-values between 95 percent and 97 percent to take into account “compensating factors” to offset reduced borrower equity. In a speech last week at the National Association of Realtors conference in New Orleans, FHFA Director Mel Watt elaborated only a little further on the agency’s recently announced mortgage guidelines, noting they will include safety and soundness standards to best manage the GSEs’ risk.

Ohio Court Sides With Freddie in Pre-Crisis Shareholder Lawsuit. An Ohio federal court late last week tossed out a shareholder class action lawsuit that accused Freddie Mac of lying about its exposure to subprime loans prior to the 2008 financial crisis. The suit, filed in 2008 by the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, claimed that Freddie artificially inflated the value of its common stock by making false public financial statements that obscured its subprime exposure.OPERS claimed it lost as much as $27.2 million as a result of Freddie’s alleged cover-up of its subprime exposure.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reported a combined $6.0 billion in net income for the third quarter of 2014, up from $5.1 billion in the previous quarter. The two GSEs will send to the Treasury $6.8 billion as return on the government’s senior preferred stock. That will bring cumulative payments under the GSE conservatorships to $225.5 billion. Fannie and Freddie were given a total of $187.4 billion in government funds in order to stay in business.

Mortgage-banking income reported by a diverse group of 33 lenders fell 16.0 percent from the second quarter of 2014 to the third, according to a new analysis by Inside Mortgage Trends. The 33 publicly traded companies, which include most of the top originators and servicers in the industry, had a combined $3.547 billion in net mortgage banking income during the third quarter. That was only 12.0 percent above the dreary $3.166 billion the group earned during the first three months of 2014, which was one of the industry’s least profitable quarters ever. The tepid third-quarter results came at a time when origination volume was unexpectedly strong – up 36.7 percent from the first quarter of 2014 – and many lenders have put ...

Mortgage delinquency rates kept falling across the country in the third quarter of the year, according to data provided by the Mortgage Bankers Association, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The delinquency rate for mortgages on one- to four-unit residential properties declined 19 basis points, on a seasonally adjusted basis, to 5.85 percent of all loans outstanding as of Sept. 30, 2014, according to the MBA. This is the lowest level seen since the fourth quarter of 2007 and represents the sixth straight quarterly decrease, according to the trade group. In terms of product mix, the seasonally adjusted delinquency rate slipped 15 bps to 3.05 percent for prime fixed loans and decreased 45 bps to 4.83 percent for prime adjustable-rate mortgages. ...

Freedom Mortgage recently broke into the top 10 ranking of mortgage originators and doesn’t look to be stopping there. Through the first nine months of 2014, Freedom produced $16.4 billion in originations, a 28.5 percent increase over the same period last year. That’s a huge increase at a time when overall mortgage origination volume dropped a whopping 44.2 percent. Last week, Freedom announced a deal to acquire Continental Home Loans, a retail lender focused on the New York metro market. Freedom officials said the deal, structured as an asset acquisition transaction, will boost its monthly production volume to $2 billion. That would raise the firm a notch or two in the rankings. Beefing up its retail presence was one reason ...

Mortgage brokers and correspondents helped fuel the surge in agency mortgage-backed securities issuance during the third quarter of 2014, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of loan-level MBS data. Correspondents originated 35.0 percent of the loans securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae during the third quarter, up slightly from the first two quarters of the year. Likewise, the share of broker originations edged up to 11.3 percent in the most recent three-month period.Wells Fargo ranked as the biggest seller of third-party originations during the first nine months of the year. The company pulled out of the broker market, although a few such loans trickled into agency MBS this year, but correspondents accounted ...