Final Civil Action: Primary Residential Mortgage. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of the Inspector General has recommended that the department’s Office of Legal Counsel acknowledged $3.13 million of a $5 million settlement agreed to by Primary Residential Mortgage is due HUD. Primary agreed last September to a $5 million settlement with the Department of Justice to resolve allegations of failing to comply with FHA requirements in connection with its origination, underwriting and endorsement of 100 FHA-insured loans. Primary’s settlement is neither an admission of guilt nor assumption of any liability that may arise from the flawed transactions, the IG said. As of Oct. 4, 2016, the settlement amount due HUD had been paid in full. Moody’s Downgrades $243 Million of FHA/VA Residential MBS. Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded the ...

Nonbanks continued to grab a larger share of the mortgage servicing business during the fourth quarter of 2016, and the rapid emergence of investor servicers – firms that buy mortgage-servicing rights while tapping other firms to actually administer the pools – promises to bring more change. A new Inside Mortgage Finance ranking and analysis shows that nonbanks that ranked among the top 50 servicers increased their holdings by 6.9 percent during the fourth quarter. Depository institutions among the top 50 servicers reduced their holdings by 1.2 percent during the same period. With Citi, the sixth-largest servicer at the end of 2016, now in the process of selling a large chunk of its MSR assets – in some cases to investors that will use subservicers – the demographics of the industry will change...[Includes two data tables]

Real estate investment trust New Residential Investment Corp. has been quietly trolling for mortgage servicing assets the past year and snagged a big one this week when it agreed to buy $97 billion in agency rights from Citigroup. Now comes the hard part: incorporating the receivables into an already fast-growing portfolio and convincing regulators at the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Ginnie Mae officials that it has both the management structure and the financial wherewithal to handle so much product. According to a tally from Inside Mortgage Finance, since early December New Residential has acquired...

Securitization of commercial mortgages was down slightly in 2016 as a result of a sharp drop in the non-agency commercial MBS market, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. Meanwhile, the agency multifamily MBS platforms cranked out record new issuance last year. In total, some $209.03 billion of commercial-property MBS were issued last year, a 3.1 percent drop from 2015. It still ranked as the second most-productive year in commercial MBS issuance since 2007, the year before the financial market meltdown. But non-agency CMBS issuance fell...[Includes one data table]

This year, the commercial MBS market will see the influence of the newly effective Securities and Exchange Commission rule on CMBS risk retention, which likely will mean higher credit quality but also a degree of unpredictability when it comes to issuance, according to industry analysts. At Wells Fargo Securities, analysts who cover the CMBS space are forecasting non-agency issuance of $65.0 billion in 2017. “While CMBS issuance has historically grown with the economy, this is not exactly the typical cycle,” they said in a recent client note. “Economic growth has been uneven and property fundamentals seem to be maturing.” Requiring CMBS issuers to retain at least 5 percent of the credit risk adds...

Higher capital charges and the cost of capital associated with risk retention mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act will make commercial MBS less competitive with portfolio lending for loans backed by high-quality collateral, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service. The report stems from a Moody’s fourth-quarter 2016 analysis of three conduit transactions that were structured to comply with risk-retention prior to its implementation on Dec. 24, 2016. In each of the transactions, issuers retained 5 percent of either the securities or the collateral pool’s cash flows. In addition, the Moody’s report noted...

Among the many impediments to a revival of the non-agency MBS market is what potential investors see as a lack of transparency from issuers. To address the issue, the Institute for Financial Transparency has created a “transparency label” that will identify non-agency MBS that include adequate disclosures. Richard Field, director of the IFT, detailed the Transparency Label Initiative in a recent study published by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and the Center for Insurance Policy and Research. “While there has been a significant amount of activity surrounding disclosure for structured finance securities, these securities still remain...

Mortgage originations defied expectations in the fourth quarter and held virtually even with the previous period, despite a measurable increase in mortgage interest rates. According to exclusive new Inside Mortgage Finance estimates, some $580.0 billion of first-lien mortgages were originated during the fourth quarter of 2016, a slight 0.9 percent drop from the third quarter. That lifted total production for the year to an estimated $2.065 trillion, up 19.0 percent from the 2015 total. Industry forecasters were...[Includes two data tables]

Moody’s Investors Service agreed to a $863.79 million settlement with the Department of Justice, 21 states and Washington, DC, late last week. The settlement focused on rating activities between 2004 and 2010 involving residential MBS and collateralized debt obligations. According to the settlement, Moody’s used an internal ratings model for most tranches of certain residential MBS that was more lenient than its published guidelines, allowing for lower credit enhancement levels than what the published guidelines required. The internal model was based...

The average daily trading volume in agency MBS fell to $192.1 billion in December, the lowest reading of the year, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. For the full year, however, average daily trading volume in agency product came to $206.6 billion, compared to $193.0 billion in 2015 and $178.0 billion in 2014. The last time trading volume was higher than in 2016 came three years earlier when $222.8 billion in agency product was traded on a daily basis. What the numbers actually mean is...