A California nonbank is in the market with an excess servicing deal tied to an $11 billion Ginnie Mae portfolio, according to investment bankers familiar with the auction process. Sources contend the sale is being managed in part by Andrew Platt, a former managing director at MountainView Capital Group, Denver, a firm that’s an active broker of servicing rights. Platt now serves as vice chairman of Sprout Mortgage, a nonprime lender based in Henderson, NV. The deal is...

Members of Congress have left Washington, DC, for their summer recess, and mortgage industry representatives are using the time to plan strategy and educate lawmakers on key issues to help propel a number of measures across the finish line before the year ends. The most time-sensitive issues are reauthorizing the national flood insurance program and setting budgets for FHA and Ginnie Mae activity in fiscal 2018, which begins Oct. 1, 2017. Lawmakers will be looking to deal with these in September. Authority for the National Flood Insurance Program expires...

The surprise tactic by Wells Fargo to withhold millions of dollars from investors in vintage non-agency MBS spurred Redwood Trust officials to try to protect the reputation of jumbo MBS. “We’re frustrated, not just for us, but for other market participants,” Christopher Abate, Redwood’s president and CFO, said late last week during the real estate investment trust’s earnings call. “For now, we’ll just have to continue updating and educating new-issue investors, and I hope for a quick resolution to this legacy litigation issue.” As of the end of June, Wells Fargo had withheld...

Investors in certain residential MBS transactions backed by defaulted mortgages in the run-up to the financial crisis are a step closer to being made whole, more than four years after the Securities and Exchange Commission announced a settlement with JPMorgan Securities, Bear Stearns and some affiliates over allegations they misled investors and mishandled bulk settlement proceeds. The case involved is Securities and Exchange Commission v. J. P. Morgan Securities LLC, EMC Mortgage, LLC, Bear Stearns Asset Backed Securities I, LLC, Structured Asset Mortgage Investments II, Inc., SACO I, Inc., and J. P. Morgan Acceptance Corporation I, Case No. 12-CV-1862 (RLW). In November 2012, the SEC filed...

The Mortgage Bankers Association said its housing-finance reform proposal would likely have little impact on consumer mortgage costs. Whether costs to consumers are modestly higher or lower will depend on how the different components suggested for reform are determined through the political process, according to the MBA. “While the precise impact on consumer costs from true housing-finance reform may be difficult to gauge, we know...

Mortgage lenders last month pumped a hefty $112.36 billion of single-family home loans into the MBS platforms of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside MBS & ABS. July’s agency MBS production was up 2.9 percent from the previous month, though it still hasn’t caught up to the monthly volume issued from May of last year through January 2017. Year-to-date production was down 0.3 percent from the first seven months of 2016. The purchase-mortgage business continued...[Includes two data tables]

New accounting rules for prepayment-sensitive assets that could give banks more flexibility in how they hedge their MBS investments are expected to be unveiled sometime in the third quarter. The Financial Accounting Standards Board recently announced that it will issue a new standard to simplify rules for hedge accounting. The standard will take effect for public companies in 2019 and private companies in 2020. “The amendments in the new standard will permit more flexibility in hedging interest rate risk for both variable-rate and fixed-rate financial instruments,” FASB said. The organization said...

For months now, the industry has expected the Trump administration to tap veteran mortgage banker David Kittle to be the new president of Ginnie Mae – but so far it’s a no go. According to industry officials who claim to have knowledge of the matter, Kittle is still the top pick, and they’re not sure why his name hasn’t shown up on the White House “Nominations & Appointments” webpage. Kittle, so far, has declined to comment. Industry officials interviewed by Inside MBS & ABS believe...

Two high-profile real estate investment trusts – Annaly Capital Management and New Residential Investment Corp. – appear to be refining their investment strategies these days, heading in different directions in terms of what asset classes they prefer. New Residential is continuing to make huge bets on mortgage servicing rights. According to its just-released earnings statement, the investor is showing no reluctance whatsoever when it comes to size. A new tally from Inside Mortgage Finance shows that New Residential ended the second quarter with $353.0 billion of “full servicing” rights in its possession, up 40.1 percent from March 31. A year ago, the REIT wasn’t...

Ginnie Mae this week announced that processing and issuance of its Platinum MBS are now fully automated – a key step in modernizing the agency’s aging technology and infrastructure. Automated processing will allow current issuers to increase their Platinum volumes as well as potentially draw new issuers into the program, the agency said. Under Ginnie’s Multiclass Securities Program, participating issuers may pool MBS into a single Platinum trust, which issues securities based on the pool. Automation went...