Investment banking firm FIG Partners, based in Atlanta, recently inaugurated a new whole-loan trading capability for small to mid-tier community and regional banks. The firm will now buy or sell performing and non-performing residential mortgages as well as commercial real estate, consumer and other types of loans for its bank and investor clients. Company officials say their new whole-loan trading capabilities complement the firm’s securities trading operations. The new platform ...

Mortgage hiring should be somewhat brisk in 2015 as lenders of different sizes plan to expand their sales forces. Prospects are especially positive for mortgage professionals in California, New England, and the Southeast, according to interviews conducted by Inside Mortgage Trends. Quicken Loans, the nation’s largest nonbank originator, hopes to hire approximately 500 new employees in the coming year, including loan officers and underwriters, said company spokesman Chris Smith ...

FIG Partners will now buy or sell performing and non-performing residential mortgages and much more.

Offering “portable” mortgages could increase the potential for homeownership by eliminating the “resetting of the clock” that occurs every time a borrower moves, according to Jeffrey Lubell, director of housing and community initiatives at Abt Associates. A portable mortgage allows a borrower to keep his or her mortgage even if he moves to a different property, helping to build equity. The loans are available in Canada and Europe but haven’t caught on in the U.S. “Few policies would ...

Most of the mortgage fraud investigations in 2013 that involved industry professionals were about misrepresentations on loan documents, evidence that the market remains fertile for fraud, according to a new LexisNexis report. Focusing on proven incidences of fraud, the report found that the share of loans investigated in 2013 for misrepresentation on the credit report, credit history or references rose to 17 percent from 5 percent in 2012. Notably, property valuation fraud ...

Commercial banks and thrifts sold some $175.6 billion of home mortgages during the third quarter of 2014, a healthy 25.4 percent increase from the prior quarter, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data. Despite the bump in loan sales and mortgage originations, the banking industry reported a modest 4.9 percent drop in mortgage-banking income during the third quarter. And there was relatively little left in the tank as the market ... [Includes one data chart]

The general consensus among those interviewed is that nonbanks will be more aggressive in their recruiting than depositories.

Mortgage brokers accounted for 10.9 percent of single-family mortgages securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the first nine months of 2014, but they achieved far deeper market shares in California and a handful of other states. Brokers originated 21.3 percent of Golden State mortgages during the first nine months of the year, their biggest footprint in any state, according to an exclusive Inside The GSEs analysis of loan-level data ... [Includes one data chart]

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are continuing their efforts in support of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s eClosing initiative as well as the broader industrywide push for eventual eMortgage adoption, despite the challenges that have confronted the latter over the past decade. Ann Epstein, product development director at Freddie, told Inside The GSEs she does not think the limited adoption of eMortgages to date is a technology issue. “The technology ...

Of that amount, $9.9 trillion is mortgaged, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, which means consumers have untapped equity of $17.6 trillion.