Marketplace lending – otherwise known as peer-to-peer lending – is becoming more of a “thing” for institutional investors, hedge funds, venture capital firms, and even banks these days, but there are plenty of risks lurking in the bushes as well as other operational challenges, according to ratings service analysts. “While marketplace lending has enjoyed increasing growth and acceptance, Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services believes a measured and cautious approach is warranted to properly evaluate this segment, which exhibits unique and heightened risks,” S&P credit analysts Ildiko Szilank and Timothy Bartl wrote in a new report. Among the risks they identified is...
The delinquency rate for loans backing commercial MBS was fairly stable in August, according to reports from Fitch Ratings and Trepp. Although Fitch reports that loan delinquencies fell one notch to 4.52 percent from the previous month, Trepp data show that the overall CMBS delinquency rate inched upward to 5.45 percent in August, from 5.42 in July. Late payment balances fell...
For investors in mortgage servicing rights, the regulatory focus seems to have shifted somewhat from documentation issues involving servicing transfers to a reliance on subservicers. At the ABS East conference produced by Information Management Network last week in Miami, Michael Drayne, a senior vice president of the office of issuer and portfolio management at Ginnie Mae, said 90 percent of the issuer applicants to Ginnie in the last three years planned to ...
The FHA will consider stakeholders’ concern about its proposal to terminate a lender’s mortgage insurance contract for missing a yet-to-be-finalized deadline for filing claims, an agency official said. For now, however, the agency remains adamant about letting the provision stand despite stakeholder complaints about its severity, said Ivery Himes, director of the Office of Single Family Asset Management at FHA, during a panel discussion this week at the Ginnie Mae annual conference in Arlington, VA. She said missed deadlines are costly and are putting a strain on the agency’s resources. Himes blamed...
The supply of home mortgage debt outstanding started growing again during the second quarter of 2015, thanks to relatively strong growth in retained portfolios, according to an Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of new data from the Federal Reserve and other sources. The Fed reported late last week that $9.901 trillion of single-family mortgage debt was outstanding as of the end of June. That was up 0.4 percent from March and represented the biggest supply of mortgage servicing since the third quarter of 2013. The servicing market had been shrinking...[Includes two data tables]
The nation’s subservicing specialists increased their contracts by a modest 4.4 percent on a sequential basis in the second quarter of 2015, a sign that many originators would rather outsource the nitty-gritty chore of loan processing to others instead of doing it in house. Compared to the same period a year earlier, subservicing grew a more impressive 20.5 percent to $1.410 trillion, according to exclusive survey figures compiled by Inside Mortgage Finance. The increasing complexity and compliance cost of servicing make...[Includes one data table]
Bond investing giant PIMCO has quietly purchased First Guaranty Mortgage Corp., Frederick, MD, for roughly $50 million, gaining a toehold into an industry it has been carefully eyeing for well over two years now. The acquisition – confirmed to Inside Mortgage Finance by several sources – comes roughly three months after the company pulled out of talks with RoundPoint Mortgage, the nation’s 24th largest servicer. PIMCO – formally known as Pacific Investment Management Co. – has tried...