Fortress also owns roughly 70 percent of Nationstar Mortgage, a stake it has held for quite some time.

The CFPB Office of Inspector General recently initiated an evaluation of the bureau’s use of vendors to support its analysis of fair lending compliance, the OIG indicated in its latest work plan. The OIG begins by noting, among other responsibilities, the CFPB is charged with providing oversight and enforcement of federal laws intended to ensure the fair, equitable and nondiscriminatory access to credit. But what may surprise many in the industry is to learn that the agency relies on external vendors to help fulfill this responsibility. “Our objective is to assess whether the CFPB effectively mitigates the risk associated with the use of vendors to support fair lending analysis, particularly with respect to potential conflicts of interest,” said the OIG ...

New Residential, a publicly traded REIT, will obtain the rights to roughly 780,000 loans ($97 billion) guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac...

Bulk transfers of Freddie Mac MSRs also increased dramatically in 4Q16, more than doubling to $17.52 billion…

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac single-family mortgage servicing grew at a relatively stable pace during the fourth quarter of 2016, but the nonbank share was up significantly. A new Inside The GSEs analysis and ranking shows that the two guaranteed $4.496 trillion of single-family mortgage-backed securities outstanding at the end of December. That was up 1.0 percent from the third quarter and 0.8 percent higher than at the end of 2015. But nonbanks held the mortgage-servicing rights on some $1.476 trillion of GSE single-family MBS, up 4.7 percent from the end of the third quarter. Their GSE servicing grew a whopping 18.5 percent during 2016, while banks and other depositories managed a small 0.6 percent increase.

In the past, Home Point has been a selective buyer of servicing rights and other companies...

The subprime auto lending market is stable and the underwriting is strong, but delinquencies are up, according to credit bureau experts speaking at the American Financial Services Association’s vehicle financing conference. The auto financing industry is coming off another record year of sales, according to Chris Stinebert, president and CEO of AFSA. He added that it’s important for credit reporting agencies to set the record straight on the health of the subprime auto finance market. “The fact is...

Maybe the CFPB should hire some loan officers who have actually closed a mortgage...

Agency mortgage servicers last year transferred some $369.44 billion of mortgage-servicing rights tied to mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, according to an exclusive new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis. Thanks to an end-of-year surge, bulk MSR transactions accounted for most of the market. During the fourth quarter, some $76.69 billion of servicing changed hands in bulk transfers, a 76.5 percent jump from ... [Includes three data charts]

In another sign that the housing and mortgage markets continue to heal from their catastrophic collapse in 2007, the national foreclosure rate in the U.S. dropped by 30.53 percent in 2016, ending the year at 0.95 percent of active mortgages, according to new data from Black Knight Financial Services. “This marks the most improvement Black Knight has seen in any year on record,” the firm said in its “first look” at December 2016 month-end mortgage performance statistics. Also, the inventory of ...