But all is not rosy. At JPM, mortgage servicing balances continue to decline and the bank’s executives expect production margins will compress as origination volumes diminish…

An ugly reality for land owners, mortgage lenders and others: the National Flood Insurance Program is currently $23 billion in debt and in dire need of reform.

The count for the Garden State is almost double the national average of 629 days...

The Ginnie Mae market was the most active of the three, with an estimated $112.6 billion in MSR sales through the first 11 months of 2015.

The average daily trading volume for agency MBS fell to a yearly low of $149.2 billion in December, as trading desks from coast to coast continued to assess how to make money in what’s become a business of tight profit margins. Late this week, Barclays Bank unveiled a massive restructuring of its MBS and whole-loan trading business, cutting the number of employees in the division – including traders – down to 50 from roughly 100. As a structural matter, the bank is moving...

Goldman Sachs last week announced it has agreed to a $5.1 billion settlement, the largest regulatory penalty in the firm’s history, concluding an investigation brought by the Residential MBS Working Group of the U.S. Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. The agreement in principle is poised to resolve actual and potential civil claims by the U.S. Department of Justice, the New York and Illinois attorneys general, the National Credit Union Administration (as conservator for several failed credit unions) and the Federal Home Loan Banks of Chicago and Seattle. At issue are...

The first security backed by proceeds from properties that have “rent-to-own” agreements has caused some divergence among rating services. Home Partners of America is preparing to issue a $508.88 million deal, which received preliminary AAA ratings from two firms. Moody’s Investors Service and Morningstar Credit Ratings issued presale reports on Home Partners of America 2016-1 last week. Kroll Bond Rating Agency followed with a warning that rent-to-own deals present more risks than single-family rental securitizations. The collateral for the security is...

There is also a school of thought that going forward, loan officers won’t be needed as much because of new origination technologies...

An estimated $254.15 billion of agency mortgage servicing rights were transferred in bulk sales transactions last year, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of loan-level mortgage-backed securities disclosures. The peak of the market came during the second quarter of 2015, when a whopping $102.27 billion of MSR were transferred to new servicers. Some $61.80 billion of that was in the Ginnie Mae program, with Bank of America ... [Includes one data chart]

With oil prices hitting multiyear lows this week, now might seem like a good time for residential lenders to tighten up underwriting standards in oil-producing states such as Alaska, Oklahoma, North Dakota and Texas. But so far, lending executives hardly seem worried. Jim Picard, vice president at Denali Home Loans in Alaska, said the state has suffered some job losses in oil “but we’re still at full employment.” He noted that energy jobs are a small part of Alaska’s economy ...