In case you’re not keeping tally, there are roughly 387 calendar days remaining before the “capital buffer” at Fannie and Freddie falls to zero on Jan. 1, 2018.

Back in late August, Ginnie Mae promised the mortgage industry that it would release a new and improved “acknowledgement agreement,” a document that defines collateral rights tied to agency servicing. But now it’s December, and no such document has surfaced. “It’s in legal,” an agency spokeswoman said, apologizing for the repeated delays. Meanwhile, there is new industry chatter that the revised acknowledgement agreement may not see the light of day for ...

The loans funded by Sterling and Lendsure entailed the use of bank statements to verify borrower income.

With rates rising almost 75 basis points since the election, more MSR packages should hit the market in the next few weeks.

Have any of the GSE stock speculators that bought on the cheap cashed out of their gains?

The one weak spot in the mortgage market during the third quarter was in traditional jumbo originations, a trend that was reinforced by a significant increase in production of agency mortgages in high-cost markets that exceeded $417,000. An estimated $101.0 billion of non-agency jumbo home loans were originated during the third quarter, down 1.9 percent from the previous quarter. At the same time, production of conforming-jumbo mortgages – loans greater than $417,000 that were securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae – jumped 27.7 percent from the second to the third quarter. Some of the disparity is...[Includes three data tables]

President-elect Donald Trump this week officially nominated former Republican primary rival Dr. Ben Carson to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development – a move that elicited mixed responses from industry and government quarters. Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon, eclipsed possible contenders for the HUD job, including Scott Brown, former U.S. senator from Massachusetts; Ed DeMarco, former acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency; Rick Lazio, former Republican congressman from New York; Blaine Leutkemeyer, another Republican lawmaker from Missouri; Brian Montgomery, former FHA commissioner and HUD assistant secretary; and Pamela Patenaude, president of the Terwilliger Foundation for Housing America’s Families. Carson’s nomination is...

The third quarter saw a sharp increase in refinance originations that appeared to give a bigger boost to government and conventional-conforming production than the jumbo market got.

Despite the uptick in rates, warehouse providers appear to be happy (for now) and, like their nonbank clients, most expect the competition to suffer and not them.

Of the $292.98 billion in non-agency jumbo mortgages originated in 2015, 3.1 percent were in areas where the loan balance would have been eligible for delivery to the GSEs under the loan limits set to take effect in January.