The most encouraging sign is that agency volume has been gaining pace. Production increased by 11.4 percent from May to June, with $76.48 billion in gross issuance.

Avalos’ resolution targets approximately 300 underwater private-label security loans that were made on homes “particularly concentrated in San Francisco’s historically black, Latino and Asian working class communities.”

As for the two banks working on jumbo securities, both have not issued any bonds in recent years but “are getting their securitization machines ready,” said one jumbo executive.

York Capital is backing Walter Capital Opportunity Corp., the buyer of the excess MSRs.

As of May, only three of the loans were 30-days delinquent, with the other once-delinquent mortgages having returned to current status or paid off.

A spike in issuance of jumbo mortgage-backed securities in the last days of the second quarter of 2014 wasn’t enough to boost issuance to the meager levels seen in the previous quarter, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. Some $1.25 billion in jumbo MBS were issued in the second quarter, a 24.9 percent decline from the previous quarter. Four issuers brought deals to the market during the quarter ... [Includes one data chart]

The Treasury Department issued a wide-ranging request for comments last week as part of an effort to increase issuance of non-agency mortgage-backed securities. Treasury officials said they are working toward developing standards and practices for the non-agency MBS market. “The private-label securities market has been dormant since the financial crisis,” said Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew. “The fact is, we need to attract more private capital to the housing market ...

JPMorgan Chase issued a $303.75 million jumbo mortgage-backed security last week backed by 15-year fixed-rate mortgages. The deal suggests that there is some viability in securitization as the loans included in the deal were suitable to be held in bank portfolios and in fact were mostly originated by banks. First Republic Bank accounted for 55.1 percent of the contributions to J.P. Morgan Mortgage Trust 2014-2 followed by Chase itself with a ...

The new lenders contributing to jumbo mortgage-backed securities could pose risks to investors in the deals, according to Standard & Poor’s. The rating service said that due diligence and strong underwriting standards currently mitigate the risks, but there are concerns that the lenders with limited track records won’t be able to fulfill representation-and-warranty repurchase obligations. Jumbo MBS have seen contributions from a mix of lenders. The main contributors ...

The anxiously-awaited Spring surge in purchase-mortgage lending finally arrived at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during recent months, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance ranking and analysis of loan-level data from the two government-sponsored enterprises. The two GSEs issued $141.83 billion of single-family mortgage-backed securities during the second quarter, an encouraging 9.8 percent increase from the dreary levels recorded in the first three months of 2014. During the first quarter of this year, Fannie/Freddie MBS production set a 14-year low of just $129.21 billion. Clearly, the market isn’t...[Includes three data charts]