MBA Calls for New QM Rules, Warns About ‘Regime Change’ Risk. The Mortgage Bankers Association is calling on the CFPB to develop a new qualified mortgage rule because the current one only works because of the so-called “GSE patch.” At the trade group’s annual secondary market conference in New York, MBA President and CEO Dave Stevens noted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac currently are approving “a lot” of loans that exceed the benchmark debt-to-income cap of 43 percent that is codified in the current QM rule. That GSE patch disappears in 2021 or when Fannie and Freddie are taken out of conservatorship, whichever comes sooner...

Industry Vendors Roll Out TRID-Compliant LOS in 50 Days. Three industry vendors, Open Mortgage, LendingQB and International Document Services, partnered to successfully implement a TRID-compliant loan origination system in just 50 days, exceeding their own projections, the companies announced recently. “We knew that our implementation timeline was aggressive, wanting to both implement a new LOS and prepare for TRID within 60 days,” said James Howard, chief technology officer of Open Mortgage, a multi-channel mortgage lender. "Our success was due to having clear implementation plans with our vendors and a team at Open Mortgage that was dedicated to the project,” he added...

The poor stock performance of this group has bloodied the water for mortgage IPOs...

Over the past five years, the issuance market for securitization has fluctuated between feast and famine, noted one executive…

The MBS holdings of 16 top mortgage REITs were down 0.3 percent from the fourth quarter...

One observer noted: “Talk about a government takeover! This feels third-world to me…”

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loan sellers pushed hard to increase originations of purchase-money mortgages during the first quarter of 2016, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis. The biggest beneficiaries were loan applicants with lower credit scores. In the first quarter of this year, 21.4 percent of purchase mortgages sold to the two government-sponsored enterprises had credit scores in the 620 to 699 range. That was up from just 14.4 percent in ... [Includes two data charts]

A preliminary analysis of 2015 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reports suggests that loan denial rates declined slightly last year. ComplianceTech, a supplier of fair lending and HMDA technologies for lenders and others, recently released an “EarlyLook” at its online Lending Patterns database of HMDA reports. A group of 175 lenders had a combined $730.9 billion in mortgage originations last year, up 35.7 percent from its volume back in 2014. The 175 aren’t necessarily the ...

The practice of an individual investor purchasing a property, fixing it up and reselling it for a profit – an activity so prevalent before the financial crisis that it spawned television shows – is making a return, especially in certain markets, according to CoreLogic. “Flipping was at an all-time high before the housing bubble burst because of easy access to credit and speculation for higher home prices,” said Bin He, principal economist at CoreLogic, in a recent blog post ...

United Guaranty was the largest MI in terms of total policies written in 1Q16, but Arch Mortgage Insurance and National MI were the fastest growers.