Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae saw a somewhat sedated increase in single-family mortgage-backed security issuance during the second quarter. The trends closely tracked forecasts. Agency purchase-mortgage business was up a solid 24.5 percent from the first quarter, boosting the 2018 market slightly ahead of where it was at the midway point last year. And refinance activity continued to tumble, dropping 21.3 percent from the first quarter to just ... [Includes two data charts]

With mortgage production costs exceptionally high, a number of lenders are outsourcing certain functions. Christopher George, president and CEO of CMG Financial, said the lender moved some operations offshore via outsourcing. “There are some areas where we can do business substantially cheaper and not compromise quality,” he said this week at the California Mortgage Bankers Association’s secondary market conference. George said two years ago, CMG had 161 ...

The reasons that the homeownership rate among millennials hasn’t been as high as it was for previous generations continues to captivate industry analysts. The latest research suggests that those born in the early 1980s through the early 2000s have delayed homeownership due to personal decisions and because home prices are rising faster than income. Nearly 60.0 percent of renters are looking to buy in the next five years and 70.0 percent of those renters are millennials ...

CoreLogic is touting a new on-demand service that makes residential condominium lending a less strenuous process for lenders even as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac warm up the market with policy changes to drum up new business. The new service, CondoSafe Express, simplifies condo lending by taking over the extra layer of work lenders must perform to originate a condo loan. “Lenders not only have to get a borrower’s credit report, verify income and ... [Includes one data chart]

California remained the biggest market in the U.S. for primary mortgage insurance during the second quarter, but other states had higher proportions of insured loans, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of agency loan-level data. In Florida, Virginia and Georgia, more than 60 percent of agency loans carried some form of primary mortgage insurance ... [Includes one data chart]

FHA officials have fretted about rising DTI ratios for some time…

A HUD spokesman told this news organization that “non-U.S. citizens without lawful residency in the U.S. are not eligible for FHA-insured mortgages.”

Noticeably absent from the letter: the FHLBs of Chicago and San Francisco…

Kraninger also avoided making a commitment to defend the CFPB’s constitutionality...

Of course, there are some in the industry who will argue Fannie and Freddie are hardly zombie-like at all...