Transfer of mortgage servicing rights, especially from banks to nonbanks, has been widely discussed over the past few years, but Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren’t saying how much is changing hands. One investment banking official who sells MSR for a living said he believes that through the first nine months of 2014, about $350 billion in agency receivables changed hands, but has no solid evidence to back it up. In fact, several servicing advisors contacted by Inside The GSEs declined to take a stab at making an estimate. According to Inside Mortgage Trends, an affiliated newsletter, commercial banks and thrifts have reduced the unpaid principal balance of home loans they service for other investors by $357.6 billion in the ...

Commercial banks and thrifts reported slightly higher valuations on their mortgage servicing rights during the third quarter of 2014, but they continued to shed MSR, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data. Banks serviced a total of $4.412 trillion of home mortgages for other investors, typically loans that have been pooled in mortgage-backed securities. That was down 1.0 percent from the second quarter and off 7.5 percent from the third quarter of 2013 ...

But there's one little wrinkle: the GSEs cannot pass the cost of funding the HTF onto lenders…

The migration of mortgage servicing rights from “more tightly to less tightly regulated parts of the financial system” should be addressed by regulators, according to the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research. The OFR, which was created by the Dodd-Frank Act to serve the Financial Stability Oversight Council, said Basel capital requirements have created incentives for banks to sell MSRs to nonbanks. In its annual report, the OFR cautioned that nonbanks aren’t as well regulated as banks. “Mortgage servicing activity and the accompanying risks appear...

The Conference of State Bank Supervisors is working on capital requirements for nonbank servicers, a story first reported by Inside Mortgage Finance last month.

Compared to two years ago, staffing levels at the CFPB have increased a whopping 55 percent. Of course, Congress has no say over the agency’s budget.

A spokesman for Ocwen – which is also the nation’s eighth largest Ginnie Mae servicer – declined to comment on anything having to do with buyouts.

But is DocMagic president and CEO Dominic Iannitti done buying? Stay tuned…

One source told IMF that in some instances, certain nonbanks have been asked by the agencies to hold “more capital” in reserve accounts than other seller/servicers.

Many of those winning bidders are hedge funds with Wall Street backing, including Lone Star Funds and Bayview Asset Management.