FHA jumbo loan originations increased in the first quarter of 2013 as well as from the same period last year pending hikes in the mortgage insurance premium and the required downpayment on loans above $625,500, according to Inside FHA Lendings analysis of FHA data. FHA jumbo lenders produced an estimated $5.44 billion in loans over $417,000 during the first three months of the year, up 6.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2012 and 14.0 percent higher compared to the volume from a year ago. Consumers continued to use the FHA jumbo product despite FHAs decision to raise the annual mortgage insurance premiums on ... [2 charts]
More Fannie Mae mortgage business is ending up in multi-issuer pools as more lenders turn to direct sales to the government-sponsored enterprise, and experts say the company has been able to turn the trend to its advantage in the securities market. According to a new loan-level analysis of single-family mortgage-backed securities by Inside Mortgage Finance, some 39.1 percent of Fannies MBS production in the first quarter of 2013 was in multi-issuer pools. That compared to 30.0 percent, by dollar volume, of the GSEs MBS issuance back in the first quarter of last year. Single-seller pools, generated mostly by the giants of the mortgage lending industry, continue...
In exploring how to attract more private capital into the housing finance system, policymakers should permit the jumbo mortgage market to stand on its own absent a government guaranty and make any future government backing explicit, experts told members of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance and Investment this week. Given that loans over the old $417,000 conforming limit account for a quarter of the dollar volume of mortgages per year, a slow and measured hand off of this segment to private capital is a low-maintenance way to reduce the governments mortgage footprint, according to Mark Willis, resident research fellow at the New York University Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. Inside Mortgage Finance estimates that loans exceeding $417,000 accounted for 16.8 percent of originations in 2012. Opening up the market above $417,000 should provide...
Feedback from residential servicers indicates that the number of new loan modifications on mortgages in non-agency MBS this year will be near levels seen last year.
Guaranty fees need to be raised by roughly 10 basis points in order for the pricing between agency and non-agency deals to be comparable, according to a new report.