Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt said he has noticed an uptick in the number of minority-owned firms active in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac transactions. Watt, speaking at the National Association of Minority Mortgage Bankers of America conference in Atlanta earlier this month, discussed the importance of diversity and inclusion in the real estate industry. He noted that although a lot of work still needs to be done, the results so far have been encouraging. “Perhaps most exciting are the results we are seeing at the financial transaction level where minority-owned firms are now involved in...

Bucking the popular notion that housing-finance reform should come with a government guarantee, a real estate professor from George Mason University suggests divvying up the risks so it’s not just on the federal government. Anthony Sanders, distinguished real estate professor in the university’s school of business, said most housing-finance reform proposals are “the same things wrapped in different color paper.” In a blog post last week, Sanders said that essentially proposals want to shut down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and open a government insurance corporation that requires an explicit guarantee at the expense of taxpayers.

Freddie Mac Announces $497M SLST. Freddie Mac announced an approximately $497 million Seasoned Loan Structured Transaction of seasoned re-performing loans from its mortgage-related investments portfolio.This will be the fourth SLST since the launch of the program in 2016 and the first SLST of 2018. It also marks the first time a Freddie-created trust will be the issuer of the SLST securitization. OIG Says FHFA Complied with Statutory Improper Payment Requirements. The Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General noted in an April 26 audit that the FHFA complied with applicable improper payment requirements during fiscal year 2017. The auditor reviewed several...

The agency share of securitized multifamily mortgages has been high since 2008…

New Residential said during and subsequent to the first quarter, it entered into agreements to buy $38.0 billion of mortgage servicing rights...

Interesting fact: Most of these non-QM loans were originated by banks...

In July 2017, the CFPB proposed an amendment to resolve the black hole issue and began taking comments.

Mel Watt has roughly eight more months in office, but already industry lobbyists and GSE watchers are playing “guess who the next FHFA director might be.”

There was a healthy flow of mortgage servicing rights during the first quarter of 2018, but it’s unclear whether this year will match the prodigious transaction volume recorded in 2017. Transfers of single-family agency servicing rights totaled an estimated $121.76 billion in the first three months of 2018, according to an exclusive Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of mortgage-backed securities data from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae ... [Includes three data charts]

The nation’s largest depositories posted weak origination results for the first quarter – noticeably weaker than some of the top-ranked nonbanks they compete against. According to an analysis by Inside Mortgage Trends, market leader Wells Fargo suffered a 19.5 percent sequential origination decline while its three closest bank competitors – JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bank, and Bank of America – fared even worse. The number two-ranked JPM ... [Includes one data chart]