The agency servicing market grew steadily in the first quarter of 2017, as the business continued to slide toward nonbanks, a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis reveals. The Federal Reserve late last week reported that total residential mortgage debt outstanding rose 0.7 percent during the first quarter, hitting $10.330 trillion. It marked the eighth consecutive quarterly increase since the sector hit its post-crash low in March 2015 at $9.912 trillion. Most of the growth came from the agency market, although portfolio holdings – including nonbanks – were...[Includes two data tables]
Agency issuance of single-family MBS posted a solid, if unspectacular, gain from April to May, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking and analysis. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae issued a combined $98.52 billion of single-family MBS last month, up 4.1 percent from their April volume. Monthly production in 2017 still hasn’t caught up to the $134.21 billion issued in January but, on a year-to-date basis, it’s running about 5.3 percent ahead of the pace set in the first five months of last year. The story in 2017 has been...[Includes two data tables]
June is shaping up to be a strong month for the non-agency MBS market with a handful of new deals that reflect the character of the sector: a reliance on scratch-and-dent transactions mixed with an emerging nonprime component and opportunistic prime jumbo issuance. Five non-agency MBS totaling $1.90 billion hit the market in the first week of June, with three S&D deals accounting for $1.30 billion of the total. The biggest of these was...
When it comes to price performance, it’s been an ugly couple of years for mortgage stocks, particularly for struggling lender/servicers such as Ocwen Financial, PHH Corp., and Walter Investment Management Corp. In a nutshell, it’s been impossible for many firms to go public or issue additional shares, though there have been exceptions, such as the MBS-investing real estate investment trusts and Impac Holdings. But now there’s talk that some larger nonbanks, and even some smaller players, might be able to issue corporate bonds. According to investment banking advisors, one trend that favors such a development is...
The House of Representatives late this week passed H.R. 10, the Financial CHOICE Act, which would undo a number of changes to the secondary market and to the regulatory landscape that were ushered in by the Dodd-Frank Act. As previously reported, among these are the elimination of the Dodd-Frank risk-retention requirements for ABS other than residential mortgages. Another provision would enable the president to remove the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency before the end of the director’s appointed term, with or without cause. It also would make...
Mortgage real estate investment trusts are expressing optimism about investment opportunities in agency MBS despite tighter spreads on credit assets, according to industry analysts at a recent mortgage finance conference in New York City. Mortgage REITs were positive on investment opportunities and believed that interest rate increases were likely to be moderate in the months ahead, said analysts with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, which hosted the conference. Industry executives, however, noted...