There have been a number of MBS issuers that have fallen short of Ginnie Mae’s strict liquidity and net worth requirements for all participants, but tighter oversight has cured most, if not of all of the cases, according to Ginnie’s top counterparty risk chief. Speaking this week at the annual Ginnie Mae summit in Washington, DC, Zack Skochko, director of counterparty risk, said several issuers have failed liquidity audits in 2016 by not maintaining the minimum $1 million cash or 10 basis points of outstanding Ginnie securities required to participate in the agency’s MBS program. The agency also requires...

JPMorgan Chase is set to end another lull in the issuance of jumbo mortgage-backed securities. The $395.40 million JPMorgan Mortgage Trust 2016-3 is scheduled to be issued next week, according to a presale report from Fitch Ratings. The most recently issued jumbo MBS priced in mid-August and was also from Chase. Only two firms with active conduits have issued jumbo MBS this year: Chase and Redwood Trust. Two Harbors Investment and WinWater Home Mortgage issued ...

The nonprime mortgage-backed security issued last week by Lone Star Funds priced at tighter spreads than the deal the company issued in June, indicating increased demand among investors. The $217.00 million COLT 2016-2 was also larger than the previous $161.40 million deal from Lone Star. According to Deutsche Bank Securities, spreads of A-1 tranche and A-2 tranche in COLT 2016-2 were respectively priced at 130 basis points and 175 bps, significantly tighter than ...

An investor-led group of participants in the non-agency mortgage-backed security market released a sample deal-agent agreement last week. The investors said the agreement can help reform non-agency MBS practices and increase issuance. Some investors have balked at buying new non-agency MBS until significant reforms are put in place. As early as July 2008, the American Securitization Forum started work on reforming the market and the Structured Finance Industry Group ...

The Department of Veterans Affairs is working on a change to its existing streamline refinancing policy to address a problem that is giving VA and Ginnie Mae the fits. Under the VA’s qualified-mortgage rule, a VA borrower must wait six months and show six months’ worth of mortgage payments before they can refinance into an IRRRL (Interest Rate Reduction Refinance Loan) and take advantage of the lower rate. However, it seems not all VA lenders are adhering to the rule and that a good number are refinancing veterans into IRRRLs even before the mandatory seasoning period ends for fear interest rates might rise and the borrower might not benefit from the lower rate. “I’ve redone the numbers in 20 different directions on how much a borrower would save if they had to wait two more months and the rate went up a quarter of a point because they lost those two months ...

Ginnie Mae continues to wrestle with issuers lacking liquidity and net worth although the number of such cases has gone down significantly, thanks to tight oversight, according to the agency’s top counterparty risk officer. Briefing participants at this year’s Ginnie Mae summit in Washington, DC, Zack Skochko, director of counterparty risk, reported that some issuers are still struggling to comply with Ginnie Mae’s liquidity and net worth requirements.A number of small issuers failed their liquidity and net worth audits this year by not maintaining the minimum $1 million cash or 10 basis points of outstanding Ginnie securities required to participate in the agency’s mortgage-backed securities program. Ginnie Mae also requires issuers to meet a minimum net worth of $2.5 million plus 35 bps of the issuer’s total effective single-family obligations The requirements were designed to ensure that the ...

Nonbank loan administrators expanded their share of the mortgage servicing market during the second quarter, mostly capturing agency business abandoned by large banks, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Mortgage Finance. Commercial banks, savings institutions and credit unions reported a combined single-family servicing portfolio of $6.930 trillion as of the end of June, according to call reports. That was down 0.5 percent from the previous quarter despite the fact that the total depository portfolio holdings of unsecuritized mortgages increased 1.7 percent during that period. But bank, thrift and credit union loan servicing for others – typically loans held in mortgage-backed securities trusts – fell...[Includes two data tables]

With liquidity and an uncertain regulatory environment dominating this year’s Ginnie Mae summit in Washington, DC, top agency officials called on stakeholders and other market participants to stand up to the challenges posed by a rapidly evolving Ginnie marketplace. Chief among those challenges is the growing domination of the Ginnie market by independent mortgage bankers, who now account for 80 percent of the agency’s monthly issuance volume. Ginnie President Ted Tozer reiterated his concerns raised last year about the increasing number of nonbanks in the agency mortgage-backed securities market with very little experience and liquidity. In his opening remarks, Tozer acknowledged...

Impac Mortgage Holdings late last week came to market with a “follow-on” offering of 3 million shares of common stock, the first public equity sale by a pure-play mortgage company in almost three years. Unfortunately, investors were not happy. When the shares hit the New York Stock Exchange last Friday, not only did Impac’s stock price tumble almost 9.0 percent, but it has continued to drift downward, resting at just over $13.00 a share as Inside Mortgage Finance went to press this week. The share price of the nation’s 28th largest originator hit...

Some residential mortgage-backed securities loan originators are moving away from performing internal post-acquisition quality control loan reviews in lieu of obtaining feedback from their whole loan investors, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service. “Some aggregators are relying more on their investors for quality control feedback,” said Moody’s. The ratings service identified in particular Redwood Residential Acquisition Corp. and JPMorgan Mortgage Acquisition Corp., which it said “are relying more on feedback from whole loan investors to monitor the quality of due diligence firm loan reviews, as opposed to conducting their own internal reviews, since a large portion of their acquisitions are sold in whole-loan trades.” Moody’s noted...