Private mortgage insurers grew their share of the primary mortgage insurance market during 2016 even though they lost some ground during the second half of the year, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance ranking and analysis. Private MIs wrote an estimated $270.30 billion of new mortgage insurance last year, a robust 23.1 percent increase from 2015. The main engine was a 24.2 percent increase in traditional, or flow, MI business, coupled with a jump in bulk primary coverage – though such activity totaled just $860.0 million in 2016. Private MIs covered...[Includes three data tables]
The secondary market for bulk agency mortgage servicing rights is beginning to pick up a decent head of steam, but one factor is holding it back from a full-throttle: worries about prepayment speeds. “We’ve had one month of low prepayment numbers,” said Mark Garland, president of MountainView Servicing Group, Denver. “A couple of more months would be better.” According to investment bankers who work the market, although rates have been on a steady climb since the November election – the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury is...
Whether President Trump is serious about replacing the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau remains to be seen. But his enthusiasm over the prospect may have gotten the better of his legal judgement and in fact perhaps laid the foundation for such a replacement to be reversed, one noted legal scholar suggested recently. “If Trump is planning on attempting to remove CFPB Director Richard Cordray ‘for cause,’ he’s hardly going about it in a smart way,” Adam Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown University, said in a recent online blog posting. “The Trump administration keeps generating more and more evidence that any for-cause removal would be purely pretextual, which strengthens Cordray’s hand were he to litigate the removal order (as he surely would).” To begin with, the reasons that are offered as justification for sacking Cordray – such as claims of employee discrimination at the bureau or the agency’s settlements with auto finance companies – refer...
A dozen or so private equity firms are taking a close look at investing in mortgage lending start-ups that claim they can originate and underwrite more cheaply than traditional players because of their cutting-edge technology. A handful of PE firms have already taken out their checkbooks, investing millions of dollars in lenders such as Better Mortgage and Nexera Holding LLC, which operates consumer-direct lender Newfi and a wholesaler called Bluestream. Roughly six months ago, Better received...
Fed Chairman Janet Yellen on the future of Fannie and Freddie: “…I would hope that Congress would decide explicitly on what the government’s role is and if there are guarantees, that they would be recognized and priced appropriately.”
Sponsors can generally meet the requirements by retaining the most subordinate tranches of the securitization equaling at least 5.0 percent of the deal…
After the government stalled on a September ruling to turn over close to 60 documents regarding the GSEs’ net worth sweep, a judge rejected its appeal. The court ordered the government to disclose the bulk of the documents to the plaintiff’s attorneys in Fairholme Funds Inc. v. United States. The U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac investors, upholding Judge Margaret Sweeney’s earlier decision. The government is to release all…
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