Reports of short sales being the new “order of the day” for servicers appear to be overblown. The proclamations were prompted by a report last week from Fitch Ratings. Banks have indeed increased their use of short sales in lieu of loan modifications when completing loss mitigation on non-agency mortgages. Meanwhile, special servicers largely avoid short sales and short sales on agency mortgages are declining. Short sales performed by the bank servicers on mortgages in non-agency mortgage-backed ...
With a turning point in mortgage interest rates and refinance activity in view in the first quarter of this year, banks and thrifts began to mark up the valuations they put on mortgage servicing rights. A new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of bank call report data shows that the industry serviced some $5.181 trillion of home mortgages for other investors as of the end of the first quarter of 2013. That was down 3.1 percent from the end of last year. As a group, the industry estimated a ... [Includes one data chart]
Signs of healing and recovery in the nation’s housing and mortgage markets continue to proliferate. Among the most recent evidence of this is that the nation’s foreclosure inventory fell substantially in April from a year ago, according to a new report from CoreLogic. As of the end of April 2013, approximately 1.1 million homes in the U.S. were in some stage of foreclosure, compared to 1.5 million the year before, a year-over-year decrease of 24 percent. The foreclosure inventory was down 2 percent from ...
Seller/servicers doing business with Freddie Mac will be charged a so-called low-activity fee for not meeting new quotas for loan deliveries and mortgage servicing beginning next year, according to a recent policy change announced by the GSE. Freddie said it will assess lenders a fee of $7,500 if they fail to deliver mortgage loans with an aggregate principal balance of more than $5 million or service mortgages for the GSE with an aggregate balance of at least $25 million. Freddie will begin monitoring loan sales and servicing beginning this year and imposing the low-activity fee on slackers beginning January of next year.
The draft includes numerous provisions designed to ensure access to the revamped secondary market for credit unions and community banks with less than $10 billion in assets.
Raj Date's new mortgage firm bills itself as a consumer finance company and is stacked with former high-level employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
The bipartisan Senate legislation being drafted to finally resolve the conservatorships of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac attempts to meet the needs of a lot of interests in the mortgage finance industry, including small lenders, Wall Street, the multifamily business and even, potentially, current owners of common stock issued by the two government-sponsored enterprises. A discussion draft of the bill, the Secondary Mortgage Market Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act of 2013, outlines a broad plan for shutting down Fannie and Freddie and replacing them with a new entity – the Federal Mortgage Insurance Corp. – that is intended as a transition to a fully private mortgage market. A copy of the draft legislation, which is primarily the work of Sens. Bob Corker, R-TN, and Mark Warner, D-VA, was provided to Inside Mortgage Finance. The draft bill includes...
A few weeks back, Flagstar Bank sold roughly $12 billion in mortgage servicing rights in a private transaction for an undisclosed sum. To date, the sale has not been disclosed but that isn’t stopping players in the MSR market from talking about the transaction as well as rumors that Flagstar, at one time, was contemplating selling upwards of $70 billion of MSR. A source close to the deal said that Flagstar was definitely contemplating a large MSR transaction late last year “but tabled it.” A spokeswoman for the bank declined to comment. If Flagstar had unloaded...
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