MBA's Dave Stevens did not mince words, calling the CFPB product "the most misleading and inaccurate tool that will do anything but help prospective homebuyers.”
ABS issuance was up 12.0 percent from the prior year, with solid gains in three of the market’s key sectors: auto finance, credit cards and business loans.
The CFPB and the Maryland AG also took action against former Wells Fargo employee Todd Cohen and his wife, Elaine Oliphant Cohen, for their alleged involvement.
FirstKey Mortgage, which has big plans in the non-agency space that include lending outside the qualified mortgage box and securitization, late this week saw the departure of three of its top executives, including CEO Bruce Witherell. According to industry officials familiar with the situation, FirstKey’s parent company, Cerberus, was beginning to take more of an active role in how the lender/issuer was being operated, a situation that didn’t sit well with some senior executives at the nonbank, including Witherell. Witherell and FirstKey executives Randy Sidhu and David Essex have accepted...
Issuers of auto ABS are loosening underwriting standards and delinquencies on subprime auto loans are increasing, but industry analysts suggest that there is little cause for concern. Performance remains much stronger than the delinquencies seen during the financial crisis and issuers are unlikely to loosen underwriting to the extent seen in the run-up to 2008. For independent finance companies, 60+ delinquencies increased by 13.7 percent in the past year, from 1.82 percent in the third quarter of 2013 to 2.07 percent in the third quarter of 2014, according to the latest data from Experian Automotive. Independent finance companies focus primarily on lending to subprime borrowers, and their delinquency trends outpaced any increase in delinquencies for other types of lenders that lend primarily to prime borrowers. Peter McNally, a vice president and senior analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, said...
Ginnie Mae plans to launch a performance-measuring tool, Issuer Operation Performance Profile (IOPP), to enable issuers to see how they stack up to the agency’s standards and make improvements. The agency did not specify a launch date but said the tool will be available “in early 2015.” It will be used to compare an issuer’s operations and defaults with those of its peers, along the lines of FHA’s compare ratio for lenders in Neighborhood Watch. The issuer scorecard is...
Kroll Bond Rating Agency updated the default and loss model the firm uses for non-agency mortgage-backed securities last week. Among other changes, the rating service reduced its loss expectations for purchase mortgages, reduced assumed timelines for foreclosures and formalized the penalty for mortgages with debt-to-income ratios above 45.0 percent. Titan Capital Solutions announced this week that it will purchase mortgages ... [Includes five briefs]
FHA lenders are gearing up to meet an anticipated increase in demand for purchase and refinance loans with mortgage rates falling to near-historic lows coupled by a 50 basis point cut in FHA’s annual insurance premium. Lenders hope the combination of lower mortgage rates and the revised FHA pricing structure will create sufficient incentive for more borrowers to purchase a home or refinance an existing mortgage. For example, Freedom Mortgage, 32nd in Inside FHA Lending’s 2014 ranking of FHA lenders, is looking to hire as many as 500 new employees to handle the anticipated surge following the FHA action. Stanley Middleman, chief executive officer of Freedom Mortgage, expects a robust FHA refinance market during the first half of 2015, tapering off in the second half. “Lower rates, coupled with premium reduction, put a lot of FHA borrowers in a position to get their ...
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