It’s a buyer’s market for mortgage firms these days, and former Cole Taylor Mortgage Chief Executive Willie Newman couldn’t be in a better place: He’s teamed up with Stone Point Capital, a hedge fund that has committed several hundred million dollars to the purchase of residential lenders. “We have a lot of plans,” Newman told Inside Mortgage Finance. “We plan to be in originations, servicing, capital markets and multi-channel production.” It was...

Former employees of the firm told IMFnews that they are perplexed as to why the company’s owners did not file a bankruptcy filing in federal court.

Ocwen Financial, once again, ranked first among all subprime servicers with a portfolio balance of $105.78 billion at March 31, a decline of 31.7 percent over the past 12 months.

Despite the not-so-good news on applications, one warehouse lender suggested to IMFnews that larger lenders are suffering much more than smaller firms.

The price quotes can vary greatly depending on the size of the company being targeted, especially if there’s a servicing portfolio and platform that needs to be looked at.

Over the past few years Envoy Mortgage had a strong emphasis on purchase-money lending and in early 2013 branched out into third-party lending. Its original focus was on retail.

On his LinkedIn page, Rowland notes that Carrington offers “compensation levels that are among the highest in the industry.”

The amount of subprime mortgages outstanding continues to decline, with servicers in the sector focusing on loan modifications. An estimated $380 billion of subprime mortgages were outstanding as of the end of the first quarter of 2014, according to a new ranking by Inside Nonconforming Markets. With few subprime originations in recent years, the amount of subprime mortgages outstanding fell by 17.2 percent compared with the first quarter of 2013 ... [Includes one data chart]

Here’s what the current state of mortgage banking boils down to: Can the industry survive on $1 trillion to $1.2 trillion in production a year through 2015?

Servicing problems are being addressed “quickly and effectively” by the servicers subject to the $25 billion national servicing settlement, save for Walter Investment Management’s Green Tree Servicing, according to Joseph Smith, the settlement’s monitor. In a report released last week, Smith said Green Tree failed eight metrics tested in the second half of 2013, while Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Ocwen and Wells Fargo passed all of their settlement tests ...