For Mel Watt, he's at the halfway point...

The average daily trading volume of agency MBS hit $223.2 billion in September, the strongest reading of the year and a sign that liquidity in the market has improved. According to figures compiled by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, daily trading volume increased by 17.7 percent compared to the same month a year ago. But the year-to-date averages are much closer: $206.6 billion for 2016 compared to $199.9 billion last year. In the agency space there is...

In a class-action ruling that could have implications for legacy MBS lawsuits, a federal appeals court confirmed a recent U.S. Supreme Court landmark decision on standing and statutory damages. Ruling in Nicklaw v. CitiMortgage earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that to establish standing in order to bring a lawsuit alleging only a statutory violation, a plaintiff must allege a concrete harm or injury resulting from the violation. Relying on the alleged statutory violation alone would only result in a dismissal, the court warned. The 11th Circuit decision is...

The jumbo market is dominated by retail lenders to a greater extent than either conventional-conforming production or government-insured lending, according to a new analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. A group of 19 top jumbo lenders reported $92.45 billion in jumbo originations through their retail operations during the first half of 2016. That represented 76.8 percent of the $120.37 billion in total jumbo production for the group. The 19 lenders accounted...[Includes one data table]

Industry participants looking to originate non-qualified mortgages or acquire the loans continue to insist that the relatively low volume of such loans is due to a lack of effort from lenders. “It’s not that the non-QM space is competing for borrowers that are getting loans elsewhere, it’s that the non-QM space is competing for origination capacity at existing originators,” said Matt Nichols, CEO of Deephaven Mortgage. Many have placed...

The underlying theme of portfolio lending is the ability to use compensating factors in underwriting a mortgage, said analysts at MIAC Analytics in a recent web posting. Portfolio lenders, many of them community bankers, have figured out to how to find profitable opportunities in the mortgage niches that don’t work in the agency market, MIAC said. Often, these are consumers who were left out of the housing recovery because of the sharp decline in capital available in the non-agency market, they added. Typically, they don’t...

Nonbanks crossed a threshold in the third quarter of 2016, posting a hefty 6.3 percent increase in their combined Ginnie Mae servicing portfolio, according to a new Inside FHA/VA Lending analysis. Nonbanks serviced $826.6 billion of Ginnie single-family mortgage-backed securities as of the end of September. That represented 51.3 percent of the total Ginnie market. The nonbank servicing total includes a small amount of Ginnie servicing held by state housing finance agencies, roughly 1.0 percent of the entire market. But it doesn’t include the significant amount of Ginnie servicing that nonbanks do as subservicers for both depository and nonbank clients. Interestingly, the biggest gain for nonbanks in percentage terms came in servicing VA loans, which rose 8.1 percent from the second quarter to $252.1 billion, or 51.0 percent of the market. The VA sector is one business from ... [4 charts ]

Norwich Commercial Group has launched a new division, Military Direct Mortgage, to focus exclusively on VA direct-to-consumer lending. Based in Avon, CT, just down the road from its parent company, Military Direct opened for business in August this year and the timing could not have been better. In September, issuance of securities backed by VA loans totaled $22.3 billion, up from $18.1 billion in August, according to Ginnie Mae data. VA loan originations saw a 17.4 percent increase in the third quarter from the previous quarter, and were up 22.3 percent over the nine-month period compared to last year. VA purchase-mortgage volume for September totaled $9.9 billion, up after a slight drop in August. Purchase-mortgage activity also improved by 26.1 percent in the third quarter, and by 16.5 percent year-over-year. VA refinance volume featured a huge 34.0 percent increase in ...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development inspector general, over the last several weeks, has reported a series of final civil actions that resulted in an enforcement action or monetary settlement between an FHA lender and the federal government. On Oct. 6, the IG announced the results of an audit of TXL Mortgage Corp., a direct endorsement lender, in Houston. The audit found TXL in violation of HUD requirements and that it had no acceptable quality-control plan in place. Specifically, 16 of the 20 sample loans the IG reviewed did not comply with HUD standards. Of the 16 loans, eight had significant underwriting defects and failed to qualify for FHA mortgage insurance. Two loans qualified but were over-insured, according to the report. As a result, TXL exposed HUD to more than $713,000 in unnecessary insurance risk and caused the department to incur more than ...

A glitch in the federal government’s Servicemembers Civil Relief Act website that had been churning out false verifications of soldiers’ active-duty status has been fixed, the Defense Manpower Data Center of the Department of Defense has announced.The bug responsible for the false negative results was removed after rendering the website inoperable for several days. The DMDC is urging active servicemembers to re-run their SCRA certificate requests if they have reason to doubt any negative results returned by the website. The DMDC shut down the website temporarily on Oct. 4 making it impossible for mortgage lenders to verify their or their vendor-partners’ compliance with the SCRA. The statute provides certain protections from civil actions against servicemembers who are called to active duty. It restricts or limits actions against active-duty military personnel in areas such as mortgages, rental and lease agreements, credit-card interest rates, tax liability, lawsuits and other debt obligations. The SCRA certificate provides information only for the purpose of verifying an individual’s active-duty status for a given time period to ...