Naysayers have been predicting the demise of publicly traded mortgage real estate investment trusts for two years now and have been consistently disappointed. It’s hard to say whether things will be different this time around. According to figures compiled by Inside MBS & ABS, it appears that most REITs have been intentionally reducing their MBS holdings over the past several quarters, preparing for the day when bond prices finally fall. At Sept. 30, 16 publicly traded REITs held...[Includes one data chart]

Mortgage securitization rates continued to trend lower through the first nine months of 2014 as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac captured a smaller share of the conventional conforming market. A new Inside MBS & ABS analysis reveals that 70.4 percent of home loans originated during the first nine months of the year were packaged into MBS. For all of 2013, the securitization rate was 78.5 percent, and it reached as high as 84.4 percent in 2009, the first year following the financial meltdown. A key factor is...[Includes one data chart]

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority will soon propose increasing transparency on trading of certain MBS, but officials say it won’t the market. Late last week, the FINRA board of governors authorized issuance of a regulatory notice soliciting comment on a proposal to amend rules for Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine, or TRACE. The proposal would provide for public dissemination of transaction information in real time for deals valued under $1 million, and in aggregate weekly and monthly reports for transactions valued at $1 million or more. FINRA Chairman and CEO Rick Ketchum said...

By some measurements, the market for commercial MBS backed by single-family rental units has been successful, drawing investors from Wall Street, the hedge fund community and overseas. But that success, to some degree, is beginning to worry the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research. Moreover, the OFR also is expressing anxieties about mortgage real estate investment trusts and repurchase agreements. As of September 2014, roughly $5 billion of single-family rental MBS had been issued...

Structured Finance Industry Group staff and some investor members met recently with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of Structured Finance to talk about the initial reaction that investors had to the final Regulation AB II rule. Among topics addressed were market trends, operational aspects and scope of applicability of the final rule, according to an update SFIG provided its members recently. Meanwhile, the SFIG is...

The City of San Francisco has delayed a proposed partnership with Richmond, CA, to use eminent-domain authority to forcibly acquire distressed mortgages out of non-agency securitization trusts, opting instead to study the impact of such an agreement as well as other alternatives to assist underwater homeowners. Opposition by the San Francisco City Controller and the mortgage banking industry has forced John Avalos, a member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, to scale back his partnership proposal. Avalos laid out...

Supporters of the non-agency residential MBS market will have plenty of heavy lifting to do next year, as they face an anticipated increase in volatility for some deals and a continued dominating presence in the broader market by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, among a host of challenges. But at least there’s some degree of regulatory certainty for the market now, and it’s likely that opportunities will emerge for savvy investors to snap up some extra yield, according to a consensus of Wall Street analysts who cover the space. Analysts at Fitch Ratings expect to see the continuation of a slow recovery for the non-agency MBS space in 2015. “The recovery in primary U.S. RMBS issuance remains anemic as the industry continues to face challenges including continued government-sponsored enterprise dominance, more attractive financing alternatives such as whole-loan sales, new mortgage regulation, and a weak AAA investor base,” Fitch analysts said in a 2015 outlook piece. Also, despite the industry’s renewed efforts led by the Structured Finance Industry Group to resolve the absence of necessary structural reforms after the financial crisis, progress is...

What do Fannie and Freddie really think of nonbanks? Read their SEC filings.

Seasonal trends hit the GSE single-family mortgage-backed securities business in November, with new issuance of single-family MBS tumbling 15.1 percent from October. A new Inside the GSEs analysis of loan-level MBS disclosures reveals that a sharp 22.0 percent drop in securitization of purchase-money mortgages was the major factor in the November decline. Refinance loans delivered to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac MBS pools were off a milder 6.8 percent from the previous month. In fact, more than half of Fannie’s MBS flow in November came from refinance loans, the first time since March that purchase mortgages accounted for less than half of the GSE’s business. One sign of the increased refinance share of GSE business ... [with two exclusive charts]

The key factor is that some mortgage originators, the megabanks especially, are keeping conventional loans in portfolio that might otherwise be securitized by Fannie and Freddie.