Freedom Mortgage Corp. is now ready to compete full time with the big boys in the rural housing market with its recent purchase of JPMorgan Chase’s rural housing business. The price of the deal was not disclosed. Freedom Mortgage’s newly acquired USDA origination platform kicked into gear on July 1, primed to serve rural-housing borrowers through its correspondent channel. Overall, the purchase would catapult the New Jersey-based nonbank to becoming the leading seller of USDA rural housing loans to Ginnie Mae. Chase Home Finance led all other USDA mortgage lenders in the first quarter of 2016 with $1.2 billion in total originations, which is 31.5 percent of all USDA-backed loans produced during the period. Freedom Mortgage was the largest VA lender and the second largest FHA lender in 2015. The acquisition of Chase’s USDA business would make Freedom the second largest, if not the ...

CA Legislature Poised to Pass Protections for Widowed Homeowners. The California legislature is a step away from enacting legislation that would extend existing foreclosure protections in the state Homeowners Bill of Rights (HBOR) to widows, widowers and other heirs of deceased homeowners. The legislature passed the HBOR in 2012 to provide due process protections to homeowners and establish rules and procedures for communication between servicers and borrowers regarding options to avoid foreclosure. However, the bill’s protections did not extend to surviving spouses and successors-in-interest who may wish to continue paying the mortgage loan but could not assume the loan or afford the payment with the loss of the deceased homeowner’s income. Surviving family members may then seek a loan assumption or modification, only to be refused by the servicer because their names are not on the ...

In the private MI segment, the biggest gain in percentage terms was in refinance loans…

At June 30, JPM held $175.8 billion of residential whole loans in portfolio, a gain of $7.06 billion over the reading at March 31.

Moody’s said third-party due diligence was completed on 30.0 percent of the mortgages…

Stonegate, like many publicly traded nonbank mortgage firms, has seen its share price suffer the past year because of declining interest rates that have forced large MSR writedowns...

The GOP convention starts in a few days and the party of Lincoln and Roosevelt (Teddy) has its daggers pointed toward Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Bully!

One mortgage insurance lobbyist added: “Fannie and Freddie really don’t want to cut fees. It would hurt their earnings. It’s hard to imagine them doing anything right now that would reduce revenues.”

The pending deal from Chase will include 4,122 mortgages, according to a due diligence review by Opus Capital Markets Consultants…

In 2015, Alterra Home Loans had a growth rate of 100 percent. The firm also has a small servicing portfolio but uses a subservicer to do the processing.