Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae produced a combined $88.96 billion of single-family MBS in January, a modest 1.4 percent decline from December, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside MBS & ABS. Ginnie production was actually up 7.2 percent from the previous month, while both the government-sponsored enterprises posted declines in new issuance. January’s agency MBS production included...[Includes two data tables]

Jefferies Funding is underwriting a securitization of a revolving warehouse facility for agency mortgages originated by two nonbanks. The $225.0 million Station Place Securitization Trust 2016-1 received provisional Aaa ratings this week from Moody’s Investors Service. The rating service said the transaction is based on a “back-to-back” repo structure, with the three classes of notes scheduled to be paid off one year after issuance. The proceeds from the sale of the notes will be used by the issuer to purchase eligible mortgages and participation certificates from the repo seller. The revolving warehouse facility will be sponsored...

The outlook for publicly traded real estate investment trusts that invest in agency MBS and related products is starting to improve, in part, because competing investments are looking ugly. That might seem like a small consolation prize for REITs, but several are posting decent earnings, even though the book value of their common stock is relatively weak. Meanwhile, while certain investors shun their stocks, many companies have engaged...

Cash-out refinances are staging a quiet comeback as rising home-price appreciation makes such deals feasible for more homeowners. The number of cash-out refinances continued to reach new recent highs in the third quarter of 2015, rivaling numbers not seen since 2008. Black Knight Financial said close to 300,000 cash-out refinances were originated in the third quarter of last year, and about one-million over the past 12 months. During that same time period, 42 percent of all first-lien refinances had a cash-out component, the highest share since 2008. In addition, the average cash-out amount was the most it’s been since 2007 at more than $60,000. In all, these homeowners tapped...

A federal appeals court in Denver unanimously affirmed a lower court ruling that a claim of damage related to an originator/seller’s misrepresentation accrues when the loan is sold. Ruling in six cases involving plaintiffs Lehman Brothers Holdings and Aurora Commercial Corp. versus Universal American Mortgage Co. and Standard Pacific Mortgage, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected plaintiffs’ contentions that their claims were really “indemnification” claims that did not accrue until they bought the loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The overarching issue in this complicated case is...

Fannie Mae said its new mortgage product that allows borrowers to have higher debt-to-income ratios because it includes income from non-borrowers is not risky. HomeReady was rolled out in August as a revised affordable lending product to replace the MyCommunityMortgage program focused on helping low- and moderate-income borrowers. A key component of HomeReady is that it counts income from relatives or friends who will also live in the home, which helps allow for a DTI ratio of up to 50 percent. Fannie said the reality of today’s market shows that homeowners are sharing homes and in many cases a significant amount of the income is being earned by the co-resident in these “extended-income households.”

Fannie Mae is planning to release an updated version of Desktop Underwriter in June with more specific details to come by the end of this month. But for now the GSE notified its lenders about some of the changes they can expect in DU Version 10.0. The updates in the latest version will “help lenders underwrite with confidence while expanding access to credit and sustainable homeownership for creditworthy borrowers,” said Fannie in a notice that went out on Jan. 28. The release is targeted to take place the weekend of June 25, 2016, and will include enhanced credit risk assessment using trended credit data provided by Equifax and Transunion. This tool...

Fannie Mae launched a new version of Fannie Mae Connect on Jan. 29 that includes five seller/servicer reports that were added to the system based on customer feedback. The Loan Delivery Edit Dashboard replaces the Data Quality Dashboard and provides insight into any possible issues at delivery with loan-level detail for fatal, warning and informational edits. About six months worth of data will be provided under this new report. This is the only new report that can be accessed by servicers as well as sellers. The Lender Dashboard gives monthly lender-specific data on things like delivery activity, loan performance and operational activities. It also includes a comparison of profile to peers and to expected loan performance value.

Freddie Default and Work Reporting Changes. Freddie Mac announced last week that servicers are not able to directly change the reporting of a third-party sale to an REO status without submitting a rollback request. Freddie said it also updated its foreclosure sale reporting error codes to more accurately reflect today’s housing market and align it with servicer’s needs. Fannie Ends 2015 with $42.3B in Multifamily Loans. Fannie Mae said that it provided $42.3 billion in financing to the multifamily market in 2015 to support 569,000 units of multifamily housing, of which more than 90 percent of the units financed support affordable or workforce housing. Approximately 99 percent of the multifamily loans Fannie financed last year were securitized...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this week announced the final piece of a multiyear process to relieve seller anxiety about potential buybacks, an independent dispute-resolution process for the most difficult to resolve repurchase demands. As a last resort, the new IDR process may not see that much activity, especially since seller repurchases of government-sponsored enterprise mortgages have been declining sharply. For a buyback dispute to get to a final determination by a third-party arbitrator, it will have to go through three normal steps in the buyback process. The IDR process began...[Includes one data table]