One former regulator told us that HUD is relying too heavily on foreclosure sales, which can drive down median values.

As an industry, banks assigned a fair-market value of $48.4 billion to their mortgage servicing rights, according to figures compiled by Inside Mortgage Trends.

A few months back top executives at RFC denied to Inside Mortgage Finance that a sale was in the works.

Will departing FHFA chief Ed DeMarco go work for a hedge fund? Stranger things have happened.

A handful of firms say they are still aggressively recruiting residential loan officers who have a solid background in purchase-money lending – that is, sales professionals with deep ties to Realtors and home builders.

State attorneys general extended the national servicing settlement to the nonbank sector with an extra emphasis on servicing transfers.

Analysts forecast uncertainty for the agency MBS market going into 2014 as the policy landscape reshapes itself and investors cautiously adapt to the shape of things to come. Look for 2014 to be a “year of transition” amid a slowly rising range of U.S. Treasury yields, a slowly recovering economy, and a Federal Reserve that transitions away from quantitative easing toward forward guidance, according to RBS analysts. RBS noted...

Unhappy with the fact that newly approved Ginnie Mae MBS issuers aren’t using the program very much, the agency plans to hire more account executives to work with mortgage firms and step up its outreach. “We’ve hired about five new account executives over the past six months,” Ginnie Mae president Ted Tozer told Inside MBS & ABS. “That gives us 12.” Tozer noted...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has issued guidance to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stating that it would like to review any transfer of mortgage servicing rights where 25,000 or more in loans are being sold, investment-banking officials told Inside The GSEs. Sales that entail MSR portfolios of under that amount will avoid FHFA scrutiny. Fannie and Freddie, as a technical matter, have control of the servicing rights to the loans they guarantee and contract out with mortgage firms to process the payments on a monthly basis.

Despite an increase in primary market mortgage rates during the third quarter of 2013, banks and thrifts were cautious in raising the valuations they placed on their mortgage servicing rights, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data. Banks and thrifts serviced $4.770 trillion in mortgages for the benefit of other investors, typically as a result of securitization. As an industry, they assigned a fair-market value of $48.4 billion for these assets ... [Includes one data chart]