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.

A lawyer by trade, Watt noted: “Unfortunately, legal constraints prevent me from saying much about this because we are in the period between the end of the comment period and the time we issue the final rule.”

The performance comes at a time when the agency increasingly seems concerned about the capital cushion of certain fast-growing nonbanks.

The announcement by Freddie Mac might be viewed as a sign that the GSEs are competing once again.

Controlled by Loan Star Funds, Caliber has $1.0 billion to spend on funding non-agency mortgages.

Beginning next year, Fannie will require seller/servicers to use trending credit data when underwriting single-family borrows through DU.