With rising origination volume and solid gain-on-sale margins, the business of originating and selling home loans generated substantially more earnings during the second quarter of 2016, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of earnings reports. But the servicing side of the business had trouble generating positive income after taking into account gyrations in mortgage servicing rights valuations and the hedges lenders place on these assets ... [Includes one data chart]

Mortgage bankers booked hefty earnings on their loan origination and secondary marketing during the second quarter, but servicing hedges deepened, according to the latest Mortgage Bankers Association performance report. The average company participating in the survey reported pretax income of $2.913 million during the second quarter, nearly quadruple the average for the previous period. That lifted year-to-date pretax income to $3.665 million, still off 16.7 percent ...

Benchmarking and other advanced analytics are helping many lenders grow their originations, according to TransUnion, a provider of data, analytics and consulting services. A recent survey by the company also found that a majority of lending organizations lack the resources to realize the competitive benefits of analytics. Versta Research surveyed 309 banks on behalf of TransUnion. Some 66 percent of the lenders said data and analytics are evolving faster than ...

Mortgage repurchase activity by banks and thrifts took an unexpected turn higher during the second quarter, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call reports. Call reports show that banks and thrifts repurchased $804.1 million of single-family mortgages, or otherwise indemnified a buyer, during the second quarter. That was up $40.0 million or 5.2 percent from the first three months of the year and marked the second straight quarterly ... [Includes one data chart]

On August 11, 2016, the most severe storm in decades hit southern Louisiana, including the city of Baton Rouge and 22 surrounding parishes. The massive rainfall brought an estimated 29 inches over a two-day period, submerging homes in three to six feet of floodwater and stranding thousands of people in their homes. On the east side of Baton Rouge is the Amite River, which separates the Ascension and Livingston parishes, where a good number of GMFS Mortgage employees ...

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both want to promote homeownership, but they have different views on how to go about it. The Democrats’ platform supports giving “everyone a fair shot at homeownership” in America by putting them in a financial position to own a home, and preserving the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage while “modernizing” credit score models. The GOP platform assures voters that the “American Dream” of homeownership “is not a stale slogan,” ...

Mortgage lenders were making big strides in reducing the number of loan defects related to documentation just as the new integrated disclosure rule took effect, leading to a surge in compliance-related defects. That’s according to a new report based on an analysis of the post-closing quality control data associated with more than 50,000 mortgages that was performed by ACES Risk Management Corp., otherwise known as ARMCO, a provider of web-based audit technology ...

Recent nonperforming loan activity at the GSEs includes billion dollar transactions in which Fannie Mae revealed the winning bidders of its seventh NPL auction and Freddie Mac marketed its first multi-servicer NPL sale. Subsidiaries of Goldman Sachs, Neuberger Berman, Lone Star and MFA were the winning bidders of Fannie’s latest nonperforming loan sale, totaling $1.06 billion. The GSE announced last week that it had sold 6,800 mortgages total, in four separate pools. Goldman’s MTGLQ Investors won the largest chunk, 2,887 loans with an aggregate unpaid principal balance of $468,901,523. Neuberger’s PRMF Acquisition LLC won the second pool, 1,551 loans, and Lone Star’s...

A GSE investor in Kentucky lost her case last week when the court dismissed claims that the government damaged Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by implementing the net worth sweep of the GSEs’ profits. Arnetia Robinson alleged that her investments in Fannie and Freddie were “materially damaged” when the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Treasury Department amended the existing preferred stock purchase agreement in 2012. According to court records, Robinson was seeking declaratory and injunctive relief that would prevent enforcement of portions of the PSPA. She contended that the sweep violates the Housing and Economic Recovery Act and said the Treasury acted “arbitrarily and capriciously.”

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are well underway preparing to implement the Uniform Closing Dataset that will become mandatory in the second half of 2017. A big part of the change is moving to an electronic process to support the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s closing disclosure.This month, Fannie announced a new collection service that it said offers flexible options for delivering the UCD file in multiple phases of the business process. It includes the ability to verify data and eligibility electronically. Banks can submit either a single file or batch file, get data quality and eligibility feedback messages, and each submission is...