VA Lenders’ Compliance with CFPB’s Ability-to-Repay and Qualified Mortgage Rules. Until the Department of Veterans Affairs’ rule on ATR/QM is in place, all VA lenders must comply with the requirements of the Truth in Lending Act, as established by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s ATR/QM rule, according to a recent agency guideline. VA will continue to guarantee all loans made in compliance with existing VA requirements, regardless of their QM status, the agency clarified. It urged lenders to refer to the CFPB guidance to ensure all their VA loans are ...

Mortgage originations late last year sank to the lowest production level since the bottom fell out of financial markets in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to a new market analysis and ranking by Inside Mortgage Finance. Lenders generated an estimated $305 billion in new originations during the fourth quarter of last year, a 33.7 percent decline from the third quarter. The mortgage market hasn’t been that slow since the fourth quarter of 2008, when production totaled just $260 billion. Production volume was...[Includes two data charts]

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s new “servicing project” will take a close look at how large-scale packages of mortgage-servicing rights are sold and transferred, but will also delve into what mortgage bankers thought was a dead issue: minimum servicing fees paid to processors. “You might say that FHFA is tackling the whole servicing arena in a big way,” said one mortgage consultant who has been briefed on the agency’s plans. The regulator’s sudden interest in transfers comes...

Increased compliance costs in recent years have done little to dampen demand for mortgage servicing rights, according to industry analysts. “The amount of capital has far outstripped the available supply,” said Dashiell Robinson, a managing director at Wells Fargo Securities, during last week’s ABS Vegas conference sponsored by the Structured Finance Industry Group and Information Management Network. William Roehrenbeck, chairman and CEO of Arvest Mortgage Company, said...

It’s been several years since a top-10 ranked lender changed hands, but it could happen this year with speculation falling on PHH Mortgage and Flagstar Bancorp. Both firms own large servicing portfolios but have sold servicing “strips” while retaining a subservicing relationship with the consumer. Investment banking sources and competitors familiar with the two say a sale of either is...

The Structured Finance Industry Group announced this week that it will convene a taskforce to establish standardized representations and warranties for new non-agency MBS. The “Project RMBS 3.0” effort will involve a wide variety of industry participants in an effort to attract investors to non-agency MBS. If the effort sounds familiar, that’s because the American Securitization Forum issued benchmark reps and warrants in 2009 as part of its Project Restart initiative. “We want to resolve these issues once and for all,” said Eric Kaplan, managing director of Shellpoint Partners and one of the leaders of Project RMBS 3.0, during this week’s ABS Vegas conference sponsored by the SFIG and Information Management Network. He said...

Credit Suisse recently filed notice with the Securities and Exchange Commission, stating that it now owns 5.4 percent of Chimera Investment Corp., a real estate investment trust whose forte is buying residential MBS. However, the investment comes at a time when a cloud is hanging over the REIT sector, especially MBS investing firms such as Chimera. Moreover, Chimera’s stock has been stuck at about $3 a share the past 16 months, mostly because it’s still wading through earnings restatements and has not been a timely filer of quarterly and annual reports with the SEC. As the company noted in one regulatory filing: “Our failure to be...

Three House Democrats have added their own proposal to the growing list of legislative housing finance reforms that, in time, could pave the way for the government to sell off Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while giving new purpose to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The reform proposal by Reps. John Delaney (MD), John Carney (DE) and Jim Himes (CT) would establish a system of government reinsurance for eligible mortgage-backed securities. The idea is to leverage the government’s capacity and the market’s ability to price risk, they said.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should revise their seller/servicer guidelines to allow use of credit scores from more than one provider in order to “foster competition,” according to a bipartisan quartet of House Financial Services Committee members. In a letter sent to Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt, Reps. Ed Royce, R-CA; Spencer Bachus, R-AL; James Himes, D-CT; and Carolyn Maloney, D-NY, said that the GSEs should not be restricted to relying on credit scores provided solely by the Fair Isaac Corp.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac combined did less business in single-family mortgage-backed securities in 2013 than the previous year while a growing share of business came from small and mid-sized lenders, according to an Inside The GSEs analysis. For the year, the two GSEs produced $1.161 trillion in single-family MBS, down 8.4 percent from their overall production in 2012.