Home Loan Servicing Solutions recently completed its first acquisition of Ginnie Mae whole loans through the agency’s early buy-out (EBO) program. The purchase price for the FHA-insured loans was $556.6 million. HLSS acquired the loans from Ocwen with an unpaid principal balance (UPB) of $549.4 million. Ocwen initially acquired the loans through the GNMA EBO program, which allows Ginnie Mae servicers to purchase delinquent loans from applicable loan securitization pools. HLSS financed its purchase by opening a new $600 million mortgage loan facility. It received $472.7 million in proceeds from this facility to help fund its EBO loan purchase from Ocwen. The loans are held as investments in a special purpose entity (SPE). “It is our expectation that since our GNMA EBO loans are insured by the FHA, the cash flows of this SPE will be sufficient to meet all claims of the debt holders,” the company said ...

He cited one example where a $40 billion MSR package can be sold to one buyer that agrees to board the servicing files in increments of say $5 billion a month.

So, what does this mean for the industry? Answer: That the Mortgage Mutual Insurance Fund likely will return to health even faster and that maybe there’s room for FHA to cut premiums.

However, he suggested that Altisource is reevaluating some of the pricing on its services. Some 6,705 properties were sold via Hubzu in the first quarter of 2014.

Two large acquisitions of mortgage servicing rights have been put on hold by regulators at the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Ginnie Mae, causing consternation in the secondary market. Moreover, according to trade group officials and advisors in the space, a deal needs to be struck between regulators and the industry that spells out the rules of the road when it comes to transferring MSRs from banks to their ultimate destination at nonbanks that are hungry for both product and market share. “We need an environment where servicing can be transferred...

The servicing rules implemented by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau at the beginning of this year appear to have resulted in improvements to customer service along with increased costs for servicers, according to industry analysts. “Most servicers have adapted their operations to make the customer experience a key focus of their servicing operations,” according to analysts at Standard & Poor’s. When reviewing servicers, S&P said...

Company Chief Executive Michael Lau noted that Pingora is taking in roughly $2.5 billion a month through “flow” arrangements.

Some stakeholders said they called the firm’s investor relations department about the latest probe and were told the firm would be saying more about the matter when it reports first quarter earnings.

However, a new research report from Sterne Agee notes: “We see the DFS as the primary log jam on the servicing transfer front.”

The FHFA shortly will begin to collect additional, more specific and personal information on borrowers and loans as part of the National Mortgage Database project the agency launched with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.