Over the past five years, the issuance market for securitization has fluctuated between feast and famine, noted one executive…

Marketplace lender Social Finance this month received seller/servicer approvals from Fannie Mae, but it remains to be seen just how active it will be in the secondary mortgage market. According to a spokesman for the privately held “SoFi,” the nonbank is now funding roughly $100 million per month in non-agency jumbos. According to firms that have done business with SoFi, it has sold the loans to OneWest Bank and Wells Fargo. To date, the online lender has yet to issue any ...

The MBS holdings of 16 top mortgage REITs were down 0.3 percent from the fourth quarter...

One observer noted: “Talk about a government takeover! This feels third-world to me…”

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loan sellers pushed hard to increase originations of purchase-money mortgages during the first quarter of 2016, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis. The biggest beneficiaries were loan applicants with lower credit scores. In the first quarter of this year, 21.4 percent of purchase mortgages sold to the two government-sponsored enterprises had credit scores in the 620 to 699 range. That was up from just 14.4 percent in ... [Includes two data charts]

Falling interest rates pounded the earnings of publicly traded nonbank lenders in early 2016 by forcing them to take huge writedowns on their mortgage servicing rights. The nine nonbank lenders tracked by Inside Mortgage Trends reported a combined $510.0 million loss in the first quarter, following a $12.7 million loss in the previous period. Back in the first quarter of 2015, the group had a combined $104.5 million in net income from their ... [Includes one data chart]

If you’re searching for some good news on the troubled PHH Corp., look no further than the book value of the company’s common stock, which is roughly $23 a share, according to a recent calculation from Sterne Agee CRT. In trading late this week, PHH’s share price was a mere $12.60, which means there appears to be plenty of upside as long as management can right the troubled ship and find a way forward as private-label clients fall to the wayside and servicing "marks" ...

A preliminary analysis of 2015 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reports suggests that loan denial rates declined slightly last year. ComplianceTech, a supplier of fair lending and HMDA technologies for lenders and others, recently released an “EarlyLook” at its online Lending Patterns database of HMDA reports. A group of 175 lenders had a combined $730.9 billion in mortgage originations last year, up 35.7 percent from its volume back in 2014. The 175 aren’t necessarily the ...

The practice of an individual investor purchasing a property, fixing it up and reselling it for a profit – an activity so prevalent before the financial crisis that it spawned television shows – is making a return, especially in certain markets, according to CoreLogic. “Flipping was at an all-time high before the housing bubble burst because of easy access to credit and speculation for higher home prices,” said Bin He, principal economist at CoreLogic, in a recent blog post ...

The GSEs are preparing big updates to their loan origination tools and one of the most noticeable changes will be Fannie Mae’s use of trended credit data to help more consumers qualify for a mortgage. Fannie will be rolling out Desktop Underwriter 10.0 during the weekend of June 25. Trended credit data relies on expanded information on borrowers’ credit history that shows the balance, minimum payment due and amount that is generally paid to determine if the consumer regularly pays off debt or carries a revolving balance. By using trended credit data in the risk assessment, Fannie said it allows for a more thorough analysis of the borrower’s credit history and is a “powerful predictor” of risk.