Two surviving spouses of deceased reverse mortgage borrowers won their case against the Department of Housing and Urban Development after a U.S. court found HUD in violation of federal law for failing to protect the spouses from foreclosure. The court’s decision marks a turning point for surviving spouses, such as Robert Bennett of Annapolis, MD, and Leila Joseph of Brooklyn, NY, and ensures that they will be protected against eviction and foreclosure, despite the loss of their husband or wife, said Jean Constantine-Davis, a senior attorney with the AARP Foundation Litigation. In March 2011, the AARP and the law firm of Mehri & Skalet of Washington, DC, filed ...

The MGIC Investment Corp. reported its second straight profitable quarter in 2013 and another increase in new insurance written. While the numbers may not yet indicate a trend, it certainly appears that the Milwaukee-based mortgage insurer is slowly but consistently showing improvement in its performance since posting a net loss of $246.9 million for the same quarter a year ago. MGIC reported net income of $12.1 million in the third quarter and $12.4 million in the second quarter, compared with a net loss of ...

Officials at Fannie Mae said they learned from Freddie Mac when structuring their pending risk-sharing transaction, including getting the deal rated. Investors are generally impressed with the transactions and look forward to more. Fannie’s Connecticut Avenue Securities Series 2013-C01 is scheduled to close on Oct. 24, according to a presale report released late last week by Fitch Ratings. The higher of the two tranches offered for sale is set to receive a BBB- rating, the lowest investment grade rating available. Speaking at the ABS East conference produced by Information Management Network this week in Miami, Laurel Davis, a vice president at Fannie Mae, said...

Investors at the ABS East conference in Miami this week had a positive outlook for most structured finance investment options, such as vintage non-agency MBS, auto and credit card ABS, collateralized loan obligations and esoteric assets. They were less bullish about new jumbo MBS. More than 3,500 people registered for the conference this year including more than 1,000 investors. Jade Friedensohn, a senior vice president at Information Management Network, the event sponsor, said it was the biggest turnout for ABS East since before the financial crisis. “In the short term things are...

Ginnie Mae this week acted quickly to dispel rumors of a plan to sunset the agency’s single-issuer MBS program, saying the report was nothing but unwarranted speculation. Agency officials assured participants during a Ginnie issuer and investor symposium in Austin, TX, earlier this month that the reports were untrue. The false buzz spooked the markets early this week, causing price spreads between Ginnie Mae I and II programs to narrow, officials acknowledged. In an Oct. 7 memo to program participants, Ginnie Mae clarified...

It’s not every day that a stock comes public at $20 a share, falls 7 percent on its first day of trading and then continues to drift downward. Then again, if that stock is a mortgage investing real estate investment trust like Cherry Hill Mortgage Investment Corp., it’s no big surprise. Thanks to rising interest rates – which actually have been in decline during the government shutdown and uncertainty over the U.S. debt ceiling – mortgage REITs have been battered in the market. Cherry Hill, a spin-off of Freedom Mortgage of Mt. Laurel, NJ, went...

If the mortgage reform legislation drafted by Sens. Bob Corker, R-TN, and Mark Warner, D-VA, becomes law, the mortgage market would be reconstituted in such a way that the nation’s largest banks could dominate the MBS market, according to the Community Mortgage Lenders of America. The CMLA, which represents small- to mid-sized residential lenders, isn’t entirely enthralled with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac either, but according to a recent letter sent to the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, it fears that “too big to fail” banks could prove an even greater danger. The correspondence notes...

The interaction between the qualified mortgage standard promulgated earlier this year by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the qualified residential mortgage standard still being developed by other federal regulators is going to have a myriad of unpleasant side effects for the securitization sector, according to a top industry attorney. “Linking of qualified residential mortgages (QRM) in the risk-retention rules to the definition of qualified mortgage (QM) in the CFPB’s ability-to-repay rules will further deepen the divide between QM and non-QM loans in terms of pricing and availability,” said Stephen Kudenholdt, chairman of the capital markets practice at the Dentons LLC law firm in New York City. Speaking during a webinar this week sponsored by Inside Mortgage Finance, an affiliated publication, the attorney indicated...

The mix of single-family mortgages securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the third quarter of 2013 continued to shift toward purchase mortgages, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of the government-sponsored enterprise market. Purchase mortgages accounted for 36.7 percent of Fannie/Freddie business during the third quarter, up from 23.9 percent during the previous period. It was the highest purchase-mortgage share of GSE business since the market collapse ... [Includes two data charts]

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have to dial back the multifamily spigot if they’re going to meet the targets their regulator wants them to as it seeks to shrink the GSEs’ presence in the space. It looks like it might require a bigger turn of the dial for Freddie than for Fannie. As part of the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s 2013 Conservatorship Scorecard, FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco has called for a 10 percent reduction target in GSE multifamily business volume this year compared to 2012.