Seller/servicers doing business with Freddie Mac will be charged a so-called low-activity fee for not meeting new quotas for loan deliveries and mortgage servicing beginning next year, according to a recent policy change announced by the GSE. Freddie said it will assess lenders a fee of $7,500 if they fail to deliver mortgage loans with an aggregate principal balance of more than $5 million or service mortgages for the GSE with an aggregate balance of at least $25 million. Freddie will begin monitoring loan sales and servicing beginning this year and imposing the low-activity fee on slackers beginning January of next year.

The draft includes numerous provisions designed to ensure access to the revamped secondary market for credit unions and community banks with less than $10 billion in assets.

Raj Date's new mortgage firm bills itself as a consumer finance company and is stacked with former high-level employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The bipartisan Senate legislation being drafted to finally resolve the conservatorships of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac attempts to meet the needs of a lot of interests in the mortgage finance industry, including small lenders, Wall Street, the multifamily business and even, potentially, current owners of common stock issued by the two government-sponsored enterprises. A discussion draft of the bill, the Secondary Mortgage Market Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act of 2013, outlines a broad plan for shutting down Fannie and Freddie and replacing them with a new entity – the Federal Mortgage Insurance Corp. – that is intended as a transition to a fully private mortgage market. A copy of the draft legislation, which is primarily the work of Sens. Bob Corker, R-TN, and Mark Warner, D-VA, was provided to Inside Mortgage Finance. The draft bill includes...

Nationstar Mortgage has been an active issuer of debt this year. The nonbank continues to scour the market for servicing acquisitions.

A few weeks back, Flagstar Bank sold roughly $12 billion in mortgage servicing rights in a private transaction for an undisclosed sum. To date, the sale has not been disclosed but that isn’t stopping players in the MSR market from talking about the transaction as well as rumors that Flagstar, at one time, was contemplating selling upwards of $70 billion of MSR. A source close to the deal said that Flagstar was definitely contemplating a large MSR transaction late last year “but tabled it.” A spokeswoman for the bank declined to comment. If Flagstar had unloaded...

Will the nation's megabanks begin shedding mortgage workers if loan applications don't rise soon?

The FHA said it is working to define a “qualified mortgage” standard that meets the QM criteria under the Dodd-Frank Act, which takes higher priced mortgages into account.

As of Wednesday morning, a GSE shareholder petition accessible through the White House website had 874 of the 100,000 signatures required by July 1.

The top contributors to the new Redwood Trust jumbo deal include George Mason Mortgage, Cole Taylor Mortgage, W.J. Bradley Mortgage Capital and PrimeLending.