The Financial Accounting Standards Board has proposed technical corrections and changes to its codified accounting handbook for private companies, including revisions to guidance relating to FHA and VA loans as well as transfers and servicing of financial assets. The proposed updates respond to suggestions by stakeholders and affect a wide variety of topics in the Accounting Standards Codification, which was established in September 2009 as a comprehensive source of authoritative generally accepted accounting principles used by the private sector. Among other things, a proposed amendment to Subtopic 860-20, Transfers and Servicing – Sales of Financial Assets would add...

Impac's residential servicing portfolio increased by 45 percent on a sequential basis to an unpaid principal balance of $5.2 billion.

Chase continues to retain large amounts of conforming mortgages in portfolio...

Was the TRID mess overblown? Tell that to all the mortgage firms that lost money on deals...

Declining interest rates introduced considerable uncertainty into the valuation of mortgage servicing rights during the first quarter of 2016, leading to a decline in bulk transfers of agency MSR, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis. Bulk sales of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae servicing rights totaled just $36.16 billion during the first three months of this year, a 37.2 percent drop from the fourth quarter of 2015. That was down ... [Includes one data chart]

An increasing number of financial institutions with a vested interest in mortgage servicing rights are showing a renewed interest in hedging against declining interest rates – something you might think they would already be doing. “You’d be surprised at who’s not hedging,” said Austin Tilghman, senior vice president of United Capital Markets, Denver. “Some mid-sized nonbanks just don’t get it.” Tilghman knows quite a bit about firms – banks included – that don’t ...

The funding models used by prominent nonbank servicers subject the firms to significant risks, according to Moody’s Investors Service, which predicted that the companies’ profitability will improve only marginally in 2016. The Moody’s analysis focused on Nationstar Mortgage, Ocwen Financial and Walter Investment Management. “All three nonbank servicers’ reliance on confidence-sensitive, short-term funding heightens their liquidity and refinancing risk,” said Warren Kornfeld ...

Molly Boesel, a senior economist at CoreLogic, noted that in judicial states, servicers must provide evidence of delinquency to the courts in order to move a borrower into foreclosure.

The publicly traded servicer/originator took in $330.7 million in revenue, a 35.2 percent decline from 1Q15. Its origination revenue was a meager $23.2 million…

Thanks to rising loan applications and a stronger-than-anticipated start to the second quarter, merger and acquisition activity in the mortgage industry is at muted levels these days, according to investment banking officials. In other words, lenders will continue to “make hay while the sun shines,” believing that current profit margins are just too good right now to consider selling out. It was originally thought...