The banking industry retreated a little further from the business of servicing mortgages for other investors during the first quarter of 2017, although a change in reporting requirements made the change look a little bigger than it really was. A new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of bank call reports shows that commercial banks and savings institutions serviced a total of $3.640 trillion of home mortgages for other investors, typically mortgage-backed securities trusts. These are mortgage servicing rights that the bank owns; in some cases a third party may perform the actual servicing and in others the bank may provide subservicing on MSR it doesn’t own. The March servicing-for-others figure was...[Includes one data table]

Profit margins and net income fell sharply in the mortgage banking business during early 2017, according to new data from the Mortgage Bankers Association. On average, firms participating in the MBA’s quarterly performance report earned just $886,000 in pretax income during the first quarter, a hefty 74.8 percent drop from the previous period. Only about two firms in three (67.0 percent) managed to report net pretax income for the first three months of the year. The industry funded...

The spring and summer home-buying season is in full throttle and with rates falling to yearly lows, mortgage bankers should be hiring in droves. Right? Not necessarily. Top-ranked lenders such as Quicken Loans and Movement Mortgage report they continue to search for new talent, but others are being careful about their hiring plans. Employment in the mortgage brokerage sector has been...

Fun fact: Ginnie Mae servicing now represents 16.5 percent of all residential debt outstanding – more than triple the program’s market share at the end of 2008.

Two years ago, Quicken Loans sold $1.25 billion worth of corporate bonds at a yield of 5.75 percent for 10 years.

Bids are due June 27. Delinquencies total just 0.3 percent of the entire package.

It certainly seems like the Financial Services Roundtable wants to be a key player in GSE reform...

Firms that specialize in subservicing home mortgages for others continued to post steady gains in the first quarter, according to a new tally from Inside Mortgage Finance. The nation’s 20 largest subservicers held $1.689 trillion of contracts at March 31, a 5.1 percent sequential gain and a hefty 24.1 percent improvement from the same period a year earlier. Also, roughly $1.877 trillion of the nation’s mortgages are...[Includes one data table]

The Department of the Treasury this week issued a report calling for stripping the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau of its supervisory powers over federally insured banks and state-supervised nonbanks, clarifying and modifying the TILA-RESPA integrated disclosure rule, and freezing additional rulemaking in mortgage servicing. The report recommends actions and changes that can be immediately undertaken to reduce regulatory overlap, fragmentation and duplication. While some of the changes could be implemented administratively, many would require congressional action. Treasury called...

The market for mortgage mergers and acquisitions is beginning to heat up with talk about who’s in – and who might be out. According to investment banking officials speaking under the condition they not be identified, Caliber Home Loans and Flagstar Bancorp continue to make their intentions known as buyers. “Caliber is looking to make a big splash,” noted one advisor who said he’s been contacted by the privately held lender. “And they have money behind them too.” That “money” would be...