Industry consultant Joe Garrett is telling clients that, “We’ve heard of at least one company that uses a fake rate sheet when recruiting loan officers. As you can guess, it shows really great rates, all fake, of course.”

The fast growing nonbank servicer/lender also disclosed a preliminary fourth quarter profit in the range of $101 million to $106 million, a 50 percent jump from the prior period.

Mortgage topics don’t always make the President’s State of the Union speech, but President Obama Tuesday night may touch on the issue of credit availability and whether the government has “gone too far.”

In fact, 10 of the 17 banks tracked by Inside Mortgage Trends posted increased mortgage-banking income during the final three months of 2013, and all of them reported a positive showing.

If Flagstar changes hands, what might become of its loan broker business, the second largest in the nation?

Meanwhile, MountainView Servicing Group is also in the market with a new MSR offering: $224 million of receivables backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac product.

Despite AEI’s findings, delinquencies on GSE loans continue to fall. In December, for example, Freddie’s single-family delinquency rate totaled 2.39 percent compared to 3.25 percent a year earlier.

The cost of mortgage compliance was a topic making the rounds at the recent ABS Vegas show in Nevada. Attendees, of course, wanted to know who might pay for all the new added costs.

“It’s nearly impossible to get the information to the right person to vote on it,” said Bill Moliski, a managing director at SG Capital and former managing director at Redwood Trust.

Non-agency MBS issuance declined by 30.6 percent from the third to the fourth quarter of 2013 as the plucky jumbo securitization sector ran out of gas. The market produced $4.94 billion of new non-agency MBS during the fourth quarter, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis and ranking, the weakest output of the year. Although there were some gains in the scratch-and-dent and re-securitization sector – markets that are almost all private placements – production of jumbo MBS fell by 71.4 percent. Even with the late fizzle, 2013 produced...[Includes three data charts]