Over the next few weeks, publicly traded real estate investment trusts that specialize in residential mortgages will begin reporting third quarter earnings and the outlook is hardly rosy. “Another difficult quarter for mREITs is behind us,” wrote Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Michael Widner and his team of researchers. “Rate uncertainty has been and remains the sector’s biggest challenge.” In other words, the slow march downward in rates has been...

The trade group for private mortgage insurers this week said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac programs that would allow sellers to obtain deeper MI coverage, up to 50 percent of the home’s value, could help lower guaranty fees charged by the two government-sponsored enterprises. U.S. Mortgage Insurers said greater front-end risk sharing almost doubles the amount of loss protection to the GSEs and allows them to reduce their committed capital for this risk by about 75 percent. As a result, the group noted...

Government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will likely exceed their regulator-mandated cap on multifamily support in the aggregate, with Fannie already topping its cap and Freddie lagging a bit in comparison. Fannie already has exceeded its scorecard cap for 2015, with three months of the year yet to go. For the first three months of 2015, Fannie issued $32.2 billion in multifamily MBS, according to figures compiled by Inside MBS & ABS. In the third quarter, Fannie issued...

Although some lenders love having a desk in a high-volume Realtor’s office, others loathe the practice. “I lost so much business to those places over the years,” he said. “I refused to pay $5,000 for a desk…”

Finally, the jumbo MBS drought is over, or will be by the end of next week.

Commercial banks – the megabanks in particular – appear to be moderating their retreat from servicing loans pooled into Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae securities. But most of the largest gains in the third quarter came from nonbanks with one glaring decline: Ocwen Financial. According to loan-level data compiled by Inside Mortgage Finance, Ocwen serviced $64.22 billion of agency collateral at Sept. 30, a blood curdling 33.7 percent sequential drop and a sign that al-though the publicly traded nonbank plans to remain a servicer of conventional loans, it continues to sell mortgage servicing rights and deleverage its balance sheet. The megabanks – Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and U.S. Bank – ranked...[Includes two data tables]

Several $1 billion-plus mortgage servicing packages have reached the auction market the past few weeks as sellers try to complete deals before yearend. But one potential obstacle could gum up the works: a continuing decline in interest rates. With the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury hovering just above the 2.0 percent mark, mortgage rates are now at their lowest levels since the spring. And as any servicing investor knows: A declining interest rate environment is never a good thing to sell into. In early September, U.S. Trading LLC, Cherry Hill, NJ, hit...

Michael Fratantoni, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, said the GSEs’ back-end risk-sharing deals do not represent the type of reform most industry participants would like to see.

One of Fannie’s and Freddie’s reputed “sins” was donating large sums of money to politicians who, in turn, ran interference for them on Capitol Hill...

At mid-year 2015, Redwood’s subsidiary had $882 million of outstanding FHLB advances with a weighted average interest rate of 0.23 percent and a weighted average maturity of six years.