A bill to redirect all 2016 funds from the Housing and Urban Development’s National Housing Trust Fund, which currently receives money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to HUD’s HOME Investment Partnerships Program, was approved by a House subcommittee last week. Affordable housing advocates question the bill approved by the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies. In essence, the bill was designed to cover a shortfall in the HOME program funding. Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said the bill “expresses a callous disregard for the plight of millions of Americans who labor in the low wage workforce and still cannot find modest housing they can afford to rent.”

Two Harbors is developing a network of lenders that will sell MSR assets to the company on a flow basis.

Like Freddie Mac, Fannie cautioned that future earnings will be lower because of the company’s mandate to shrink.

Most firms report the earnings/loss figure in the first or second paragraph of their press release, but not Stonegate Mortgage.

The overall size of the single-family mortgage servicing market isn’t changing much, but the dynamics of the business continued to shift in early 2015, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis and ranking. The Federal Reserve won’t provide an official reading on single-family mortgage debt outstanding as of the end of the first quarter for another month or so, but the data point to little or no growth in the market during early 2015. Mortgage originations were...[Includes two data charts]

Thanks to the recent uptick in interest rates, the value of mortgage servicing rights is on the rise again, which should pave the way for a busy spring and early summer for investment bankers who play in the space. “Prices are holding up pretty well,” said Mark Garland, president of MountainView Servicing Group, Denver. “Prepayment speeds increased in March, but April speeds have come down a bit.” According to Garland, buyers of receivables are paying...

Freddie Mac will send $746 million to the U.S. Treasury under the conservatorship plan that siphons off nearly all the government-sponsored enterprise’s net profit every quarter, but that’s not all the cash being milked from the GSE. During the first quarter of 2015, Freddie sent $219 million to Treasury under the 2011 law that squeezed the GSEs to pay for a continuation of a payroll tax cut for U.S. workers. The levy is 10 basis points of guaranty fee charged by Freddie and Fannie Mae, and it’s a steadily rising amount as a greater share of GSE business is subject to the charge. In the first quarter of last year, Freddie paid...

Quicken Loans recently sold $1.25 billion of corporate debt through a private placement, and speculation is rising that the nation’s largest nonbank originator may use the cash to significantly expand its servicing portfolio. As Inside Mortgage Finance went to press this week, company spokesman Aaron Emerson said he had no information about servicing expansion. Regarding details of the debt sale, he noted: “Legally, there’s not much I can say about the topic.” Quicken serviced...

In the first quarter, Freddie Mac's net interest income rose on a sequential basis by a mere 2 percent to $3.647 billion.

Fannie Mae reported Tuesday that the GSE issued $10.4 billion of multifamily MBS in the first quarter of 2015, primarily through its delegated underwriting and servicing program.