The Department of Veterans Affairs has issued guidance clarifying certain procedures when conveying a property to the agency in Florida. Overall, it is necessary to provide proper documentation when conveying a property to VA. This usually involves providing an owner’s title insurance policy with no exclusions, other than for taxes that have not been billed but may be accrued against the property. In 2008, Florida amended its condominium and planned unit development (PUDs) laws to allow homeowner associations (HOAs) to collect unpaid dues and assessments. The purpose of the legislative change was to make current owners jointly liable with the past owner for the full amount of past-due HOA dues and assessments, unless the HOA was named in the foreclosure complaint at the time it was filed. However, if the HOA is properly named in the foreclosure, a current owner’s limited liability could be less. In order to ...

Mortgage production ran into a seasonal buzz-kill and stiffer headwinds from interest rates during the third quarter of 2015, leading to a modest decline in volume, according to a new InsideMortgage Finance market analysis and ranking. An estimated $455.0 billion of single-family first-lien mortgages were originated during the third quarter, down 7.1 percent from the second quarter of 2015. But on a year-to-date basis, total originations were up 42.9 percent from the first nine months of last year. In fact, at $1.350 trillion, production through the end of September had already topped last year’s $1.300 trillion. A lot of this year’s increase came...[Includes two data tables]

Although most analysts and industry observers agree that the FHA cut in mortgage insurance premiums, effective in January, has resulted in stronger purchase volumes and credit availability, opinions vary as to whether another reduction is on the way. The FY 2014 independent actuarial audit of the FHA Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund projected FHA’s total loan production in fiscal 2015 at $124 billion. With the FHA pricing adjustment, production is now expected to increase by 60 percent, with total production estimated at $200 billion by the end of the fiscal year, said Brian Chappelle, an industry consultant. As program fundamentals trend upward, Chappelle is...

First Mortgage Corp., Ontario, CA, this month completed its liquidation, selling its branch network and $6 billion of servicing rights to other firms, and winding down a 44-year-old business that catered to FHA borrowers with lower credit scores. Jean Ziroli-Kobielsky, a recruiter for the family-owned business, noted that it wasn’t fear of regulatory oversight that prompted her father and brother to sell FMC, it was technology: “Some of our technology systems were still using DOS,” she told Inside Mortgage Finance. (DOS, or disk operating system, was the precursor to the Microsoft Windows software line for PCs.) She said...

Many independent mortgage companies that are relatively new to the mortgage servicing market are actively managing their portfolios in a constantly shifting environment, according to panelists at the annual convention of the Mortgage Bankers Association. The surprisingly cheap cost of retaining mortgage servicing rights during the 2012 bonanza led a number of nonbank lenders to start amassing MSR portfolios. It has become a valuable tool in managing cash flow and earnings in the volatile mortgage production market of recent years. Guild Mortgage is...

The younger generation appears ready to take the plunge into the housing market, but finding an affordable home and gaining access to credit remain the top challenges, especially when it comes to African-Americans and Latinos, according to some experts. Mark Fleming, chief economist with First American, sponsor of a housing forum on Capitol Hill this week, said the way mortgage credit is formulated today doesn’t necessarily fit the type of ethnically diverse, millennial borrower of the future. “Ethnically diverse communities tend...

A number of factors are making new MBS in the to-be-announced market less attractive to investors than MBS issued a few years ago, according to a report from Deutsche Bank Securities. “Aggressive servicers keep picking up market share, credit quality keeps softening and loan balances edge up,” the analysts said. “It adds up to declining quality for TBA MBS.” While those trends certainly aren’t new, Deutsche Bank said...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development late last week withdrew a controversial proposed rule that aimed to speed the process by which residential servicers file FHA insurance claims. A number of industry participants were critical of the proposed claims-filing deadline, warning that it would prompt significant problems. Among other provisions, the proposal issued in July would have established a deadline for insurance claims to be filed with the FHA. “This new deadline will ensure FHA can effectively manage and process timely claims,” HUD said at the time. Originally, the agency proposed...

The Inspector General of the Department of Housing and Urban Development has warned users not to rely on Ginnie Mae’s fiscal years 2011-2014 financial statements after expressing displeasure over the agency’s inadequate explanation of material misstatements identified during a 2014 audit. The warning came in a memorandum the HUD IG issued in response to Ginnie’s restatement notification on Sept. 16, 2015, commenting on the fiscal 2014 audit report. The audit left certain issues unresolved due to its limited scope, causing the IG to issue a disclaimer of opinion on the FY 2014 financial statements. Specifically, the uncertainty focused...

Nonbanks comprised a significant portion of Ginnie Mae business as independent mortgage companies replaced banks as primary securitizers of FHA and VA loans. In the third quarter of 2015, mortgage companies accounted for 60.8 percent of VA loans and 67.1 percent of FHA loans securitized in Ginnie pools. For mortgage companies, production of Ginnie mortgage-backed securities backed by FHA loans increased by 5.0 percent in the third quarter from the previous quarter and was up a whopping 118.1 percent during the first nine months of 2015 over the same period last year. Nonbank securitization of VA loans rose by a modest 1.5 percent quarter over quarter and by 83.6 percent over the nine-month period compared to the same period last year. Megabanks, whose assets exceed $1 trillion, were the second largest issuers of Ginnie Mae MBS, accounting for less than ... [3 charts]