All the world loves the CFPB? Not in the mortgage space, it seems. Financial services consultant Joe Garrett said he has six mortgage clients that have undergone exams by the agency. To say the least, it hasn't been a happy experience.
Commercial banks and savings institutions increasingly saw more value in their mortgage servicing rights as 2013 came to a close, but they showed little interest in trying to get more. Banks and thrifts serviced $4.641 trillion of mortgage loans for other investors as of the end of 2013, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data. That was down 13.2 percent from the end of 2012, including a 2.7 percent drop in the fourth quarter ... [Includes one data chart]
The long-awaited auction of nonperforming mortgages by HSBC USA appears to be underway, though the bank isn’t providing much guidance on the dollar volume of loans it intends to sell this year. In early March, HSBC held a private auction of roughly $1.2 billion of NPLs, according to investors briefed on the sale. “Only a select group of buyers was invited to participate,” said one source. Rumored bidders include Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, among others. A spokeswoman for HSBC ...
The average time on market for short sales has increased significantly in the past year, according to the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey. The problems appear to be due to approvals from sellers as well as lenders’ concerns about financing such purchases. Short sales completed in February were on the market for 17 weeks, based on a three-month moving average. That’s a 30.8 percent increase from the average time on market for short sales ...
Fannie, Freddie Helped by Special Servicers. While nonbank servicers are under scrutiny from a number of different parties, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac said special servicers reduce credit losses compared with traditional bank servicers. In its latest earnings report, Freddie said it facilitated the transfer of servicing for $55.6 billion in unpaid principal balance to special servicers in 2013. “Some of these specialty servicers have grown rapidly in the last two years and now service a large share of our loans,” the GSE said.
When conflicts of interest were unearthed, Aurora terminated the contract in 2012, leaving $28 million in unpaid bills. But Allonhill wanted its money.
It’s been a busy quarter for sales of mortgage servicing rights, but most of them have involved portfolios of $2 billion or less, spurring talk in the industry that regulatory oversight of MSR transfers is affecting the mergers and acquisition market. In particular, dealmakers are starting to call it the “Lawsky Effect,” named after Benjamin Lawsky, the superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services who in early February put a “hold” on Wells Fargo’s sale of $39 billion in MSRs to Ocwen Financial. Lawsky has stated his concerns about Ocwen’s fast growth, its capacity to take on massive new assignments and complaints about some of its servicing practices. “I have not heard...
Top Democrats on Capitol Hill are peeved that the Justice Department is not making the prosecution of mortgage lender and servicer abuses much of a priority, and they are pressing Attorney General Eric Holder for a meeting to discuss what to do about it. Their ire was raised by a recent report from the DOJ’s Inspector General that found, among other things, that the department had not prioritized the investigation of mortgage fraud and that it reported unreliable, inflated statistics about the scope of its prosecutorial efforts. In a letter to the DOJ, Reps. Elijah Cummings, D-MD, and Maxine Waters, D-CA, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, focused...
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