A record number of investors are participating in the vehicle ABS sector and competition is increasing among issuers, prompting issuance and pricing close to pre-crisis levels. However, there are concerns that the strong performance by recent vintages of vehicle ABS will not last as underwriting standards loosen. Robert McDonald, a vice president at Goldman Sachs, said a vehicle ABS with 40 investors was previously considered to be a broadly distributed transaction. He said recent deals have had 60 investors. “We’re at an all-time high in terms of the number of unique investors for a transaction,” McDonald said at the American Securitization Forum’s ASF 2013 conference. Some $61.00 billion in ABS backed...
Moody’s Investor Services ranked as the top rating service in non-mortgage ABS ratings during 2012, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking. DBRS was the leader in rating non-agency MBS transactions last year. In a market that grew by 15.9 percent in 2012, Moody’s increased the volume of ABS deals it rated by just 6.9 percent over its activity back in 2011. Still, the company edged past Fitch Ratings with a 64.9 percent market share even though it mostly sat out the booming credit card sector. Moody’s had its highest penetration rates in business loan ABS and was well represented in student loan and vehicle finance securitizations. Fitch had...[Includes two data charts]
Three of the nation’s major credit rating agencies are the subject of a mortgage securities-related probe by New York’s top prosecutor, following the issuance of a subpoena and other requests for information on certain rated pre-financial crisis deals. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman quietly launched his own investigation last week into allegations that Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings issued favorable ratings to certain MBS leading up to the financial crisis to drum up more business. Schneiderman issued...
Add this to the mortgage banker worry-list: the FHFA is once again toying with the idea of changing the minimum servicing fee on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans.
It was thought that after the financial shellacking it took by purchasing GMAC Mortgage, that hedge fund giant Cerberus might avoid the residential finance industry entirely. But perish the thought. Cerberus this month filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering for Cerberus Mortgage Capital, a real estate investment trust that hopes to raise at least $150 million. Its goal: to use the money to buy a “broad range” of residential-related assets including ...
Real estate investment trusts focused on investing in agency mortgage-backed securities were called out last week by Federal Reserve Governor Jeremy Stein. Industry participants acknowledge the Fed’s concerns and suggest that agency REIT investment strategies will naturally shift as yields on the products have declined, among other factors. Stein warned of “overheating” markets and pointed to agency-focused mortgage REITs. “When I say that the market for a particular class of credit instruments ...
Officials in the financial services sector are making a fresh push to alert the mortgage and residential mortgage-backed securities industries to the potential pitfalls that delinquent homeowner association accounts pose for them. “The securitization industry has little understanding” of homeowner and other types of community associations, collectively referred to as HOAs, said Jason Serrano, co-head of structured products and managing director for securities at Oak Hill Advisors ...
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