One positive trend for the mortgage insurance sector is that the growth in business during the second quarter was squarely in purchase mortgages and traditional MI loan-to-value ranges.

Don't believe the naysayers. Second quarter originations turned out to be better than expected.

Suddenly, REITs are entering into alliance deals regarding jumbo mortgages. Five Oaks Investment is the latest.

The Democratic proposal calls for private mortgage capital to backstop the first 5 percent of conventional-mortgage securitizations with the remaining 95 percent of risk shared “on a pari passu basis.”

The modest rebound in the housing market during the second quarter of 2014 produced a solid increase in the volume of home loans with private mortgage insurance securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis and ranking reveals that the two government-sponsored enterprises securitized $37.36 billion of single-family mortgages with private MI coverage during the second quarter. That was up 24.7 percent from the first three months of the year, which had produced a dismal $29.95 billion of MI-insured loans in new GSE mortgage-backed securities. By comparison, total GSE business was...[Includes two data charts]

Thanks to lousy origination profits posted over the past six months, mortgage bankers increasingly are boosting earnings through servicing-released arrangements, causing a mini-boom in flow transactions. “You might say we’re back to a normal operating environment where originations are cash-flow negative,” which is forcing lenders to book profits through MSR sales, said Jeff Levine, managing director of Houlihan Lokey, an investment banking firm. But Levine is...

Marc Savitt, president of the National Association of Independent Housing Professionals, said he is seeing more lenders entering the wholesale channel. Most are nonbanks.

Non-QM origination volume could rise above $400 billion a year if the GSEs are no longer in conservatorship. Of course, Fannie and Freddie are nowhere close to doing that...

Impac anticipates that 90 percent of its non-QM volume will come through the correspondent and broker channels.

An early analysis of second quarter loan level data suggests that residential originations were a little better in the April to June time-frame than some might believe. See this website on Thursday for more information…