Interest rates offered for mortgages generally track with pricing for the loans in the secondary market. However, new research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that lenders offer worse pricing to borrowers when demand for loans is relatively strong. The findings were detailed in a working paper authored by Andreas Fuster, Stephanie Lo and Paul Willen. Fuster and Willen are in research departments at Fed banks, while Lo is currently a ...
Mortgage-banking profits improved dramatically during the second quarter as production volume surged and servicing held its own, according to data reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Participants in the group’s quarterly mortgage-banking performance study reported average pretax income of $2.12 million for the second quarter. That was up handsomely from the average $886,000 companies earned in the first three months of the year. Profits weren’t as strong as they were ...
Over the past few weeks, two $100 million-plus transactions involving mortgage technology companies have been announced, signaling that more activity may be ahead in the space as residential finance moves toward the digital age. “This is an interesting time,” said consultant Jeff Lebowitz, a former Fannie Mae executive who has been tracking tech changes for two-plus decades. “There’s a paradigm shift going on. Outside guys are coming in, thinking there’s big changes ahead for ...
Independent mortgage bankers are leading all other lenders in providing mortgage loans to first-time homebuyers, minorities, lower-income borrowers and rural areas, and yet they are more regulated than banks, according to a new industry report. The report from the Community Home Lenders Association underscores the fact that IMBs are small businesses that don’t have access to federally insured deposits. It claims that IMBs have done a better job of servicing home loans ...
The latest mortgage lender sentiment survey from Fannie Mae finds that industry leaders are paying increasing attention to enhancing the borrower experience, thanks to competitive market pressures. To what degree they can actually pull that off remains to be seen. Doug Duncan, senior vice president and chief economist for the government-sponsored enterprise, noted in an online post that the company’s previous survey found that senior mortgage executives were worried ...
Changing demographics will be the private mortgage insurance industry’s most powerful growth engine over the next 20 years, predicts an industry report published by the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. The new report cited U.S. census data showing a 10 percent increase in the share of minority households in U.S. homeownership over the last two decades. It forecasts the share will increase to 38 percent by 2030. Demographic shifts, growth of minority households ...
Publicly traded companies generally reported improved earnings on the production side of their mortgage banking activities during the second quarter of 2017 but slumping income from servicing. A group of 12 lenders that includes most of the top players in the industry reported a combined $1.16 billion in production-related income during the second quarter, up 6.9 percent from the first three months of the year. Combined origination volume was up ... [Includes one data chart]
During the second quarter, the housing market witnessed the largest number of first-timers buying homes in almost two decades and that’s helping to drive price appreciation through 2018, according to a new study by Genworth Financial. Second-quarter numbers show that FTHBs accounted for 570,000 single-family home purchases, compared to 424,000 in the previous period. Genworth said this marks the highest quarterly number since 1999 and is the continuation of a trend that began in the third quarter of 2013. That number accounts...
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