Are loan officers headed for extinction? There certainly will be much less of a market for them in the future if the new online platform, No Originating Loan Officer, being rolled out by 360 Mortgage Group, a privately-owned mortgage banking firm based in Austin, TX, takes hold across the industry. On the other hand, fewer humans in the mortgage lending mix may mean fewer opportunities for errors, cutting compliance corners or engaging in steering and other discriminatory practices that ...
Home-price depreciation was a greater driver of mortgage defaults during the financial crisis than unemployment, according to an analysis by S&P Global Ratings. The findings are counterintuitive because many borrowers continued to make mortgage payments when they experienced negative equity while the lack of employment can make it difficult to keep up with a mortgage. S&P studied loan-level data from the government-sponsored enterprises for mortgages ...
The end of a long-term decline in interest rates will trigger a resurgence of the second-lien market and alter the mortgage market in other areas as well, according to a working paper published by the Urban Institute. How much mortgage rates will rise is unclear, but the 35-year secular decline in interest rates is over, author Laurie Goodman maintained in her preliminary study, “The Impact of Higher Interest Rates on the Mortgage Market.” Goodman, co-director of UI’s Housing Finance ...
The volume of purchase mortgages being originated isn’t as strong as it could be because of the amount of home sales completed solely with cash, according to economists at Freddie Mac. The cash share of home sales is declining, but it remains well above historic levels. The economists projected that about 6.2 million homes will be sold this year. With the cash share of home sales around 20 percent, Freddie projects that $1.38 trillion in purchase mortgages will be originated this year. If the cash share was at the norm of 10 percent, an additional $172.0 billion in purchase mortgages would be originated in 2017, according to the government-sponsored enterprise. Before the financial crisis, about 10 percent of home sales were...
Senate Democrats opposing the administration’s proposed cuts to HUD’s FY 2018 spending bill have reportedly placed a hold on Pantenaude’s nomination...
The wholesale-broker market saw a surge in origination volume during the second quarter of 2017, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Mortgage Finance. All three primary-market production channels recorded big gains in the second quarter, but mortgage brokers posted the biggest increase, a 35.1 percent jump in first-lien mortgage originations to an estimated $50.0 billion. Most of the top wholesale funders in the sector reported similarly big increases in production. One reason the broker share of originations rose in the second quarter was...[Includes four data tables]