The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is on the lookout for lenders that facilitate occupancy fraud as a way to avoid the agency's ability-to-repay rule.

Meanwhile, industry sources said Select Portfolio Servicing is working on a large MSR acquisition, which could transfer shortly.

The jumbo MBS market has been extremely weak this year, but a change may be afoot.

So, what’s the biggest impediment to mortgage volumes taking off this spring? According to a new poll from Inside Mortgage Finance, it’s a lack of housing inventory.

The new survey of more than 2,000 real estate agents found that respondents recommend specific mortgage providers for 59 percent of their homebuyer transactions.

S&P rated seven of the 11 non-agency MBS issued in the first three months of 2014, or 78 percent based on dollar volume, according to Inside MBS & ABS.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will ramp up their risk-sharing transactions significantly in 2014, and may see a somewhat expanded share of MBS issuance, under a new conservatorship plan announced this week by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The revised “scorecard” also tweaks the project to develop a common securitization platform. The FHFA said it wants each of the two government-sponsored enterprises to structure transactions that transfer some portion of the credit risk on $90 billion of residential MBS this year, three times the level they were directed to reach last year. Both companies appear to be well on the way to meeting this requirement. Freddie late last month announced...

The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee voted 13-to-9 to report out a revised version of the controversial housing-finance reform legislation, but the bill’s tweaks weren’t enough to win the support of the panel’s liberal Democrat members. Committee Chairman Tim Johnson, D-SD, and Ranking Member Mike Crapo, R-ID, released their initial draft in March, which built upon the bill submitted last year by Sens. Bob Corker, R-TN, and Mark Warner, D-VA. Though the Housing Finance Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act of 2013, S. 1217, cleared committee with one more than the minimum 12 votes required, an affirmative vote of at least 16 of the 22 members of the panel had been seen...

In a few months, mortgage insurance giant Radian Group will close on its $305 million cash purchase of Clayton Holdings, ending the “independent” status of one of the nation’s largest MBS due-diligence firms. Almost all the larger due-diligence companies have been gobbled up by larger players over the past 18 months. Most of the acquirers have other interests in the residential finance industry and are betting on the eventual return of the non-agency MBS market. That could be...

“FHFA hasn’t dropped the ball on the issue,” said one MI consultant who has met with the agency over the topic. “They now know that the [GSE reform bill] is dead and they want to make sure they get it right.”