Shellpoint Acceptance Corp. hopes to come to market with its first non-agency MBS by summer, securitizing not only jumbo loans, but a host of mortgages that fall outside Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac underwriting guidelines for different reasons. According to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company has committed $2 billion in capital to its shelf registration, though its first deal will be smaller than that. Shellpoint refers...

Freddie Mac is offering $1.0 billion of its non-agency MBS holdings for sale, according to a spokesman for the government-sponsored enterprise, part of efforts to meet requirements set by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Fannie Mae also plans asset sales of some sort, but wouldn’t commit to selling its non-agency MBS holdings. Freddie held $70.28 billion in non-agency MBS at the end of the first quarter of 2013 and Fannie held $31.22 billion. The GSEs purchased the non-agency MBS before 2009 and have allowed the holdings to run off ever since. The FHFA recently required...

While non-agency MBS participants largely oppose a credit rating assignment system proposed by Sen. Al Franken, D-MN, some of the main players in the market endorse a model based on ratings rotation. At a roundtable hosted by the Securities and Exchange Commission this week, Martin Hughes, CEO of Redwood Trust, said issuer-paid rating conflicts could be reduced by requiring non-agency MBS issuers to alternate rating services so that one firm didn’t rate more than two consecutive deals from the issuer. He noted that Redwood has established a self-imposed rotation between Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s on its non-agency MBS issuance. “The requirement to frequently alternate among the nationally recognized...

All three pistons in the mortgage origination engine slowed down during the first quarter of 2013, but retail production came closest to keeping the pace in a declining market, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside Mortgage Finance. Lenders produced an estimated $310.0 billion in originations through retail offices, bank branches, call centers and online activities during the first three months of 2013. That was down 0.9 percent from the previous quarter, but because overall production slipped 4.8 percent, the retail share of the market surged to a record 62.0 percent. The wholesale channel – both correspondent and broker – accounted...[Includes four data charts]

Mortgage delinquency rates declined during the first quarter of 2013, according to an index compiled by Inside Mortgage Finance based on 19 lenders that service a total of $6.04 trillion in home mortgages. The overall delinquency rate index fell from 9.47 percent at the end of 2012 to 8.70 percent at the end of the first quarter. That was the lowest level since the third quarter of 2008. There were...[Includes one data chart]

Efforts by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to use the False Claims Act to recoup $1 billion in losses suffered by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have suffered a big setback. Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff dismissed claims for treble damages and penalties the federal government brought under the FCA against Bank of America as successor to Countrywide Financial for allegedly selling defective loans to the two government-sponsored enterprises while representing that the mortgages complied with their requirements. The government asserted...

The ability-to-repay rule promulgated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is perhaps the single most important mortgage-related regulation the CFPB will produce under the Dodd-Frank Act, and mortgage lenders will need a vigorous and comprehensive strategy if they are going to make qualified mortgages profitably while maintaining the desired level of legal protection. But before lenders get to the compliance pieces of the QM puzzle, they’ve got to figure out “how to get to QM” and what types of loans they want to make. “We’re assuming...

In exploring how to attract more private capital into the housing finance system, policymakers should permit the jumbo mortgage market to stand on its own absent a government guaranty and make any future government backing explicit, experts told members of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment this week. Given that loans over the old $417,000 conforming limit account for a quarter of the dollar volume of mortgages per year, a slow and measured hand off of this segment to private capital is a low-maintenance way to reduce the government’s mortgage footprint, according to Mark Willis, resident research fellow at the New York University Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. Inside Mortgage Finance estimates that loans exceeding $417,000 accounted for 16.8 percent of originations in 2012. “Opening up the market above $417,000 should provide...

Over the past few weeks, speculators have been driving up the price of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac common stock and “trust” preferred shares in the hope of a payoff somewhere down the line. But according to interviews conducted by Inside Mortgage Finance, the only payoff might come if they can find someone else willing to pay more than they did for stock that is considered virtually worthless. Industry lobbyists, former government-sponsored enterprise executives and some investors say...

More Fannie Mae mortgage business is ending up in multi-issuer pools as more lenders turn to direct sales to the government-sponsored enterprise, and experts say the company has been able to turn the trend to its advantage in the securities market. According to a new loan-level analysis of single-family mortgage-backed securities by Inside Mortgage Finance, some 39.1 percent of Fannie’s MBS production in the first quarter of 2013 was in multi-issuer pools. That compared to 30.0 percent, by dollar volume, of the GSE’s MBS issuance back in the first quarter of last year. Single-seller pools, generated mostly by the giants of the mortgage lending industry, continue...