A pilot jumbo loan program between the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago and Redwood Trust has grown to include three more FHLBanks, with the potential to expand to more. Mortgage Partnership Finance Direct is specifically a high-balance loan product that connects the Mortgage Partnership Finance conduit program with Redwood Trust to offer access to private capital when selling fixed-rate mortgages in the secondary market. Eric Schambow, senior vice president and director of the Chicago FHLBank’s MPF Program, said...
Banks and thrifts held $155.55 billion of non-mortgage ABS on their books as of the end of March, a 2.3 percent decline from the previous quarter, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis of call-report data. The first-quarter figures mark the fifth straight quarterly decline in bank ABS holdings, which peaked at $173.80 billion at the end of 2013. Bank ABS holdings were down 9.9 percent from the first quarter of last year. Almost every ABS category was...[Includes two data tables]
The Chicago Federal Home Loan Bank hopes to issue its very first Ginnie Mae MBS by the third quarter, and if all goes well certain other FHLBanks may become issuers as well. In a recent speech, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt noted the interest in the program, saying the agency has “approved the requests of several other FHLBanks to participate.” Watt did not identify...
Morningstar Credit Ratings may increase its presence in the residential MBS market after rating its first re-securitization last week and revising its rating criteria for new non-agency MBS. The push follows Morningstar’s initial effort to rate non-agency MBS in 2012, which didn’t generate any business. The company has rated commercial MBS and single-family rental securities. Last week, the rating service published...
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have found deep investor appetite for credit-risk transfer transactions, but their exploration of new structures may not get to the front-end tradeoff of deeper mortgage insurance for reduced MBS guaranty fees. During a panel session at last week’s secondary market conference sponsored by the Mortgage Bankers Association, Kevin Palmer, a Freddie vice president, said the government-sponsored enterprises launched their credit-risk transfers to reduce taxpayer exposure and distribute risk more broadly in the mortgage finance system. Fannie and Freddie have...
Although no “large” mortgage companies have changed hands in quite some time, investor interest in small to medium-sized lenders remains strong as banks, private-equity funds and nonbanks continue to show their interest as buyers. Since last fall, at least 25 deals have been publicly disclosed, according to sales tracked by Inside Mortgage Finance, but none of the originators have been larger than $4 billion a year in production. According to interviews conducted over the past week with investment banking advisors, in the months ahead lenders that originate between $500 million to $2 billion a year are...
The former analyst said Freddie has “an inferior security [MBS] necessitating the need for a lot of time and expense to create a common securitization platform…”
All three mortgage-production channels saw increased volume during the first quarter of 2015, but brokers made the most of the rising market, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance ranking and analysis. Mortgage brokers produced an estimated $39.0 billion of home mortgages during the first three months of 2015, an increase of 14.7 percent over the fourth quarter. That pushed the broker share of originations to 10.8 percent, the sector’s highest market share since 2010. Retail production facilities did...[Includes five data tables]
It stands to reason that by waiving the charge that Freddie might take in less revenue, but a GSE spokesman said as a financial matter, “it’s not material.”