Although some lenders love having a desk in a high-volume Realtor’s office, others loathe the practice. “I lost so much business to those places over the years,” he said. “I refused to pay $5,000 for a desk…”

Fannie Mae said that next year lenders would be able to verify a borrower’s income electronically and find ways to lend to customers with nontraditional credit histories. Fannie announced during the Mortgage Bankers Association convention this week changes to extend credit access to potential borrowers who typically have trouble finding a mortgage. Among those changes announced this week and set to take place in 2016, the GSE will require lenders to use trended credit data when underwriting single-family borrowers through its Desktop Underwriter program. The data, provided by Equifax and Transunion, will allow a more detailed analysis of the borrower’s credit history, according to Fannie. Currently, reports only indicate the outstanding balances and if a borrower has been...

Mel Watt, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, dished on several GSE-related issues, including the common securitization platform and expanding access to credit, at the Mortgage Bankers Association conference in San Diego this week. After announcing last month that the CSP and single security will be launched in two stages, with no confirmation of an exact timeline yet, Watt said, “We realize that there is a degree of impatience and a desire to see all these efforts completed right away. While not in a position to give you specific dates right now, I can confirm that we plan to announce the Release 1 timeline in 2016.” He added that the FHFA also hopes to be able to announce the...

It’s been an active week of GSE announcements with new initiatives, partnerships and increased competition between the duo. This appears to be an acknowledgment that GSE reform is not anywhere in the short-term plan and Freddie Mac, along with Fannie Mae, are taking matters into their own hands to help right the market. Freddie unveiled a partnership with Quicken Loans to modify some of the underwriting guidelines on its low-downpayment mortgage program, Home Possible. While not many details were available, Brad German, Freddie’s spokesman, said, “We're at the start of a work in progress to jointly develop products specifically aimed at the housing needs of millennials, first-time buyers, the middle class and other eligible borrowers.”

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae securitized $119.7 billion of correspondent-originated loans during the third quarter of 2015, a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis reveals. That was up 8.6 percent from the second quarter. Meanwhile, broker production fell 10.6 percent during the third quarter. Brokered loans accounted for just 11.5 percent of agency mortgage-backed securities issued during the third quarter, down from 12.9 percent in ... [Includes one data chart]

New Actual-Loss Risk Transfers for Fannie, Freddie. This week, Fannie Mae announced that it priced its latest credit risk-sharing transaction under its Connecticut Avenue Securities series. While this is Fannie’s 9th CAS deal, this is its first CAS transaction structured using an actual-loss framework, which will be the standard for the CAS program going forward. The $1.45 billion note offering is scheduled to settle on Oct. 27. Meanwhile, Freddie Mac also announced its intention to sell its seventh Structured Agency Credit Risk debt notes offering this year for more than $1 billion. This STACR Series 2015-DNA3 offering is the company’s fourth transaction where losses will be allocated based on the actual losses. FHFA, GSE Departures. The most recent Fannie Mae executive...

Commercial banks – the megabanks in particular – appear to be moderating their retreat from servicing loans pooled into Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae securities. But most of the largest gains in the third quarter came from nonbanks with one glaring decline: Ocwen Financial. According to loan-level data compiled by Inside Mortgage Finance, Ocwen serviced $64.22 billion of agency collateral at Sept. 30, a blood curdling 33.7 percent sequential drop and a sign that al-though the publicly traded nonbank plans to remain a servicer of conventional loans, it continues to sell mortgage servicing rights and deleverage its balance sheet. The megabanks – Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and U.S. Bank – ranked...[Includes two data tables]

Several $1 billion-plus mortgage servicing packages have reached the auction market the past few weeks as sellers try to complete deals before yearend. But one potential obstacle could gum up the works: a continuing decline in interest rates. With the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury hovering just above the 2.0 percent mark, mortgage rates are now at their lowest levels since the spring. And as any servicing investor knows: A declining interest rate environment is never a good thing to sell into. In early September, U.S. Trading LLC, Cherry Hill, NJ, hit...

In a spurt of new activity unveiled at the annual convention of the Mortgage Bankers Association this week, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are ramping up the competition between each other, announcing new programs and partnerships and acting as though housing reform is not on the radar anytime soon. And it may not be. While rumors have swirled recently, hinting that the government-sponsored enterprises may be released from conservatorship, White House and Treasury officials confirmed this week that there are no such plans to recapitalize and release the two from government stewardship. “None of us should be misled...

Mortgage lenders face a growing risk from cyberattacks from an increasingly sophisticated hacker universe, as well as more regulatory scrutiny over the issue, according to experts at this week’s annual convention of the Mortgage Bankers Association. “There is an arms bazaar of malware for sale in the market, with about 300 new programs – that we know about – being released every day,” said Roger Cressey, a partner at Liberty Group Ventures. The market has been turned into a business, with malware sellers forging service level agreements with their customers through which the buyer doesn’t have to pay if the product doesn’t result in a successful intrusion, he said. Because many hackers are more interested in stealing the target’s client information than crashing its system, the mortgage industry – which sits on mountains of personally identifiable information – is...