Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are more than halfway towards reaching their goal of reducing their retained mortgage portfolios to no more than $250 billion each by 2018, according to Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt. Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee this week, Watt said the two government-sponsored enterprises have developed plans to meet their investment targets, $250 billion each, in accordance with terms of their conservatorship. As of Sept. 30, 2014, Freddie’s portfolio stood...
Production of structured finance deals backed by agency single-family pass-through securities fell sharply during the fourth quarter of 2014, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae issued a total of $44.41 billion of real estate mortgage investment conduits during the fourth quarter, down 25.5 percent from the previous period. Ginnie and Freddie, the most active agency REMIC issuers for the year, were responsible for most of the decline. On a year-to-date basis, Fannie production was...[Includes one data chart]
With interest rates at exceptionally low levels in recent years, borrowers have been reluctant to choose adjustable-rate mortgages. For those opting for ARMs, hybrids remain the most popular, according to results from the annual ARM survey recently released by Freddie Mac. ARMs accounted for 4.6 percent of the $921.72 billion in mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae in 2014 ... [Includes one data chart]
Two other servicing packages hit the market the past few days, including a seasoned $276 million Ginnie Mae portfolio from Interactive Mortgage Advisors.
2014 wasn’t a great year for mortgage origination volume, but the market rallied from a dismal start to finish on a more positive note, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance market analysis and ranking of top loan producers. Mortgage lenders originated an estimated $1.24 trillion in new home loans during 2014. That figure, which includes home-equity lending, was the industry’s lowest annual output since year 2000, when total originations barely topped the $1 trillion mark. Mortgage production fell a hefty 34.4 percent from 2013 levels, including a modest 1.4 percent drop in the fourth quarter of 2014. The soft fourth-quarter volume was...[Includes two data charts]
Sales of mortgage servicing rights by big banks will continue to be driven by the desire to reduce the handling of delinquent mortgages – not by Basel III capital requirements, according to analysts at Moody’s Investors Service. Nonbank servicers that have grown in recent years often cite Basel capital requirements as a significant factor in bank sales of MSRs. Warren Kornfeld, a senior vice president at Moody’s, noted that Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase were active sellers of MSRs in recent years. “We believe the sales were primarily motivated by their desire to reduce credit-impaired servicing volume,” he said. Under Basel III, banks face...
RSS