In anticipation of plans to securitize loans that had been previously delinquent, this week Fannie Mae announced that it will release historical data on some 700,000 re-performing loans. The release, scheduled for July, will include updated credit scores and loan-to-value ratios at issuance. This coincides with Fannie’s efforts to become more transparent and give the market the ability to analyze how these re-performing loans, or RPLs, have performed over ...

Calls for a GSE recapitalization are growing louder as industry groups and lawmakers urge Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt to exercise his authority and suspend the Treasury Department’s sweep of Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac profits. Letters to the FHFA and Treasury last week came from a group of small lenders, affordable housing organizations and civil rights advocates, while a group of 32 Democrats on Capitol Hill also chimed in ...

A new poll by the U.S. Mortgage Insurers showed strong consumer support for housing reform efforts that rely on private capital to take on a majority of the risk currently placed on the GSEs. Close to half of the 2,000 respondents, 48 percent, said the private sector should bear the responsibility for the risk of losses on bad loans. Some 19 percent of the respondents said borrowers should bear the responsibility, while another 19 percent were not certain who the loss should ...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, is urging the Federal Housing Finance Agency to solicit public comments on FHFA’s policy regarding super-liens imposed by homeowner associations on loans in foreclosure. The FHFA has said it is obligated to protect the rights of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and will aggressively do so. Super-lien laws are currently in 22 states and the District of Columbia. They allow homeowner associations that are owed fees to take priority over ...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac credit-risk transfer transactions have evolved since they were introduced in late 2012, according to a recent report by DBRS. The rating service analyzed Fannie’s Connecticut Avenue Securities and Freddie’s Structured Agency Credit Risk transactions and concluded that they have performed well with low delinquencies. DBRS attributed the strong performance to “prudent underwriting, the GSEs’ solid seller and servicer approval process and ...

Freddie Mac Sells $130 Million of NPLs. Last week, Freddie Mac announced it auctioned 487 deeply delinquent loans serviced by JPMorgan Chase Bank from its portfolio on May 31, 2016. The loans have been delinquent for approximately three and half years on average and the transaction is expected to settle in August 2016. Mortgages that were previously modified and subsequently became delinquent comprise ... [Includes two briefs]

The banking industry still hasn’t touched bottom in its years-long retreat from the mortgage servicing rights business. Banks and thrifts reported a total of $4.001 trillion of single-family mortgage servicing for other investors, most commonly mortgage-backed securities trusts, as of the end of March. That was down some $52.9 billion from the previous quarter, a 1.3 percent decline, according to a new analysis of call-report data by Inside Mortgage Trends ... [Includes one data chart]

Upheaval in hedging mortgage servicing rights during the first quarter of this year damped what was otherwise a strong performance by the loan production side, according to data reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Participants in the MBA’s quarterly performance study reported average pretax income of $752,000 for the first three months of the year. That was down 36.8 percent from the fourth quarter, and represented the lowest reading since ...

Later this month, Fannie Mae will begin to use trended credit data when completing credit risk assessments on mortgages submitted to the government-sponsored enterprise. Fannie claims the data “allow a smarter, more thorough analysis” of a borrower’s credit history, though the mortgage approval rate by the GSE isn’t expected to change much. In Selling Guide Announcement SEL-2016-04 published last week, Fannie detailed plans for trended credit data in the pending ...

A new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of publicly-traded lender earnings reports reveals that profitability fell on both the production side and loan servicing. A group of 12 major lenders reported a combined $1.15 billion in production-related income for the first quarter, a 3.1 percent drop from the previous period. That outcome doesn’t look so bad in light of the fact that the group’s total origination volume was down 5.3 percent from the fourth quarter ... [Includes one data chart]