Credit Suisse sold two warehouse facility-backed securities this week totaling $800.0 million, according to Moody’s Investors Service. The rating service placed A2 ratings on the Mortgage Repurchase Agreement Financing Trust Series 2016-1 and Series 2016-2 transactions. Much like a warehouse facility security issued by Jefferies in May, Moody’s said the MRAFT securities are structured with two legs of “back to back” repurchase agreements. The first leg consists...

Moody’s Investors Service has asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to dismiss the remaining claim in a lawsuit alleging manipulation of credit ratings leading up to the financial crisis. In its motion to dismiss, Moody’s said that plaintiff Ilya Eric Kolchinksy’s second amended complaint fails to show that the rating agency used its electronic “ratings delivery service” to issue false ratings on MBS that later turned bad. In 2012, Kolchinsky, a former managing director at Moody’s, filed...

Ocwen Financial agreed to a consent order with the Washington State Department of Financial Institutions this week, which included a $900,000 fine. The consent order related to Ocwen’s use of offshore unlicensed affiliate companies to service mortgages on properties in Washington state. Going forward, Ocwen agreed to service Washington-based mortgages only through licensed entities and the state will not license foreign entities ... [Includes three briefs]

FHA saw a modest rise in originations midway through 2016 compared to the same period last year, but VA did a lot better with a double-digit increase in loan production, according to an analysis of Ginnie Mae data. Lenders delivered $123.0 billion of FHA-insured loans to Ginnie pools during the first half of 2016, up 8.4 percent from the previous year. FHA’s midyear production was driven by a surge in purchase-mortgage lending in the second quarter, which also pushed volume higher for VA as well as conventional-conforming mortgages. Government-backed lending rose 32.3 percent from the first quarter to approximately $131.0 billion in second-quarter originations, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, an affiliate publication of Inside FHA/VA Lending. It was the highest three-month total for government-insured lending on record, although private mortgage insurance did more business in the ... [2 charts]

Major industry trade groups are asking FHA and VA to suspend proposed guidelines for energy-improvement loans and give stakeholders an opportunity to comment. In a joint letter, 11 trade groups warned that the proposed agency guidelines regarding Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) loans raises serious concerns that must be resolved before implementation of any PACE guidance. Prior to the issuance of the new guidelines, both FHA and VA prohibited the financing or refinancing if there was a lien other than the FHA-insured or VA-guaranteed mortgages. PACE programs are available in 19 states but most are in California. They provide financing for home improvements and clean-energy upgrades that would result in more efficient use of water and electricity, and ultimately savings for homeowners. The PACE obligation is repaid through a property-tax assessment, which takes a ...

Mortgage Company President Charged with Defrauding Ginnie Mae. Robert Pena, president and founder of the now-defunct Mortgage Security Inc., was charged in federal district court in Boston for allegedly bilking Ginnie Mae out of nearly $3 million. MSI was an approved participant in the Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities program, pooling eligible single-family mortgages and selling the securitized products to investors. The firm also serviced the underlying loans. In 2011, Pena allegedly began diverting borrower payments and huge loan-payoff amounts into secret accounts, which he used to fund personal and business activities. Likewise, he is said to have funneled borrowers’ escrow funds and mortgage-insurance premiums into other personal accounts. In total, Pena pocketed $3 million due Ginnie Mae, which had to pay investors whose investments it had guaranteed, according to the ...

All three major mortgage-production channels posted significant gains in volume from the first quarter of 2016 to the second, but retail posted the biggest increase. According to a new Inside Mortgage Finance ranking and analysis, an estimated $300 billion in first-lien mortgages were originated through retail platforms during the second quarter, including traditional brick-and-mortar offices and consumer-direct efforts. That was up 36.4 percent from the first three months of the year, and a scant 1.4 percent higher on a year-to-date basis. The retail share edged up to 58.8 percent, the highest it’s been in two years. Wells Fargo remained...[Includes four data tables]

New disclosures on risk-sharing transactions from Freddie Mac provide some details on the automated valuation model used by the government-sponsored enterprise to determine home prices and loan-to-value ratios. Freddie’s AVM – Home Value Explorer – provides home price valuations that are a little higher than the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, according to analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. The analysts based their findings on estimates of current LTV ratios that Freddie recently added to monthly loan-level disclosures on Structured Agency Credit Risk transactions. LTV ratios based on Freddie’s AVM were...

New legal requirements enacted in the state of New York in the wake of the financial crisis pose particular compliance challenges for mortgage servicers, according to a new report by analysts at S&P Global Ratings. The S&P team recently reviewed a series of laws the state legislature passed in June that attempts to address several issues related to “zombie” foreclosures, which refers to the phenomenon of a servicer initiating foreclosure on a vacant property but not going so far as to actually take title. Urban community activists complain such properties languish unsold for a prolonged period of time, contributing to neighborhood blight in communities least able to handle it – hence, state lawmakers decided to act.One resulting requirement “imposes conditions ...

Commercial banks and savings institutions continued to load up on residential MBS during the second quarter of 2016, pushing their investment in the sector to a new high, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside MBS & ABS. Banks and thrifts reported MBS holdings of $1.684 trillion as of the end of June, a 1.4 percent increase since the previous quarter. These are long-term holdings in banks’ held-to-maturity and available-for-sale portfolios. The industry held another $46.02 billion of MBS in their trading accounts. Not surprisingly, all of the gain came in agency MBS, particularly pass-through securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The industry’s aggregate holdings of these securities, $867.64 billion, were up 4.1 percent from the ...