The shift from distressed property sales to non-distressed creates opportunities for mortgage bankers because distressed properties are often purchased by investors with cash.

Fannie Mae this week hired James Kittridge, a former executive from Barclays Capital, to manage its participation in the fledgling common securitization platform project with Freddie Mac. However, both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – and their regulator – continue to provide little in the way of public information on how the CSP project is progressing. The Federal Housing Finance Agency will not even confirm that it recently hired the search firm of Spencer Stuart to help find an executive to oversee work being performed by the government-sponsored enterprises and a core group of staffers at the regulator. The starting salary for the FHFA CSP post is...

It’s not a surprise that FHFA has been quiet about its not-overly popular state-level g-fee proposal, according to Robert Bostrom, a shareholder at the law firm of Greenberg Traurig and a former general counsel at Freddie Mac.

Now that PennyMac Mortgage Investment Trust has put together its first jumbo MBS, can a security collateralized by non-performing loans be far behind? “We’ve looked at it,” said a company spokesman. “We’d like to do one down the road, but we’re not there yet. For us, it will happen when the execution of NPLs is more economical.” One thing is...

Five years after it filed for Chapter 11 protection, the remains of the investment bank Lehman Brothers is asking a New York bankruptcy judge to rebuff a legal claim by Freddie Mac that would put the GSE at the front of the line of creditors. In papers filed with U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan last week, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. said that Freddie is not entitled to a “priority recovery” under Lehman’s confirmed plan of reorganization as the GSE seeks to recover $1.2 billion in unpaid loans. Freddie had been...

The industry believes there are problems in the QM rule's content and requirements as well as in developing policies and procedures to support the measure and implement it.

The implementation date for lower GSE loan limits is being shifted to the end of the first quarter, or so we hear. Meanwhile, Citadel enters the market for stand-alone seconds.

A reduction in agency loan limits would make a small portion of today’s mortgage market ineligible for the government-sponsored enterprises, according to a new analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. However, industry participants suggest that lower loan limits will help increase participation in the non-agency market and test whether the sector can take even more share from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Mortgages with loan balances greater than $417,000 accounted for ... [Includes one data chart]

Lenders have started to loosen their underwriting standards for jumbo mortgages in an effort to increase originations for borrowers who have performed exceptionally well in recent years. Loan-to-value ratio requirements in particular have loosened, allowing for lower downpayments or increased use of second liens. After the non-agency mortgage-backed security market collapsed in 2008, combined LTV ratios of 70 percent were common for jumbos as lenders looked to prevent pricey foreclosures on ...

An official at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency warned that non-agency jumbos with interest rates lower than comparable agency mortgages are a sign that banks are chasing yield. Darrin Benhart, deputy comptroller for credit and market risk, said banks are taking on more interest rate risk and credit risk to maximize returns. “We are beginning to see signs of the classic cyclicality in banking where traditional lagging indicators are improving so bankers start to layer risk back into ...