PHH Mortgage, Walter Investment Management Corp. and Ocwen Financial these days are all working from the same survival playbook: sell their most valuable asset – mortgage servicing rights – and remain as the subservicer of record. The idea is simple. All three hope to raise cash by selling MSR assets, eliminate the need to hold large sums for servicing advances and – importantly – buy some time. There’s...
The Trump administration’s tax-reform plan could boost home sales somewhat, though the National Association of Realtors and National Association of Home Builders have raised significant concerns about the treatment of deductions. At the end of April, the Trump administration released a one-page outline for reforming federal taxes. It calls for doubling the standard deduction to $24,000, maintaining the mortgage interest deduction and repealing the deduction for state and local taxes. William Brown, president of NAR, said the plan would effectively eliminate...
Private mortgage insurers were the largest providers of insurance coverage on purchase loans securitized by the three agencies in early 2017, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis. Private MI coverage was attached to $40.08 billion of purchase mortgages securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the first quarter. That equaled 26.3 percent of total purchase business by the two government-sponsored enterprises and Ginnie Mae. The FHA provided...[Includes one data table]
Some of the slowdown in non-agency CMBS is likely due to lingering uncertainty about risk-retention requirements, which took effect at the end of 2016.