The mortgage banking industry is optimistic about Congress enacting legislation that would cure VA orphan loans before the midterm elections. The U.S. Senate still has time to consider H.R. 6737, the Protect Affordable Mortgages for Veterans Act, according to Bill Kilmer, chief lobbyist at the Mortgage Bankers Association. “Most observers think [lawmakers are] going to be around until Oct. 18 or 19, which is when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he wants to keep folks around to work on nominations and other measures they need to clear,” Kilmer said. “There is time and, more to the substantive point, the bill passed the House.” H.R. 6737 would provide a technical fix so that certain VA refinance loans would be eligible for pooling in a Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed security. The bill was reported out of committee by a unanimous 49-0 vote, and was approved quickly by the House ...

FHA Issues Waiver of Property Inspections in Disaster-Stricken California Counties. FHA has issued a waiver of its timing policy for completing property inspections prior to closing or endorsing a loan for FHA insurance. The waiver is in effect in presidentially declared major disaster areas in Lake and Shasta Counties, CA, that were ravaged by wildfires and high winds. FHA believes that the wildfires and high winds have stabilized so as not to cause any further damage to properties, even though FEMA has not declared “all clear” in the affected areas. The waiver allows damage inspections to be completed after Oct. 2, for properties located in the PDMDA. NC Commissioner of Banks Amends State Reverse Mortgage Rules. The North Carolina Commissioner of Banks recently amended its ...

Increased competition in the non-qualified mortgage market could reduce interest rates paid by borrowers and slow the sector’s speedy prepayment rates, said S&P Global Ratings. Non-QM loans, the fastest growing segment of the residential MBS market, repay quickly, often within one year of origination. S&P noted the conditional prepayment rate of non-QM loans is about 35 percent, while the rate for non-agency prime jumbos ranges from 5 percent to 15 percent. “The predominant reason to ...

Ongoing challenges in the retail sector are raising questions about the credit implications for some structured finance collateral, though the negative effects on the commercial MBS market appear to be limited due to a strong economy, according to a report by Moody’s Investors Service. The disruption in the U.S. retail sector has been caused by the growth of online shopping, cutthroat competition, over-expansion and inability to adapt to changing consumer demands, the report indicated ...

Ginnie Mae assured the mortgage industry that it would accept so-called VA orphan loans as long as they satisfy the terms of corrective legislation passed by the House Financial Services Committee recently. “As long as the mortgage loan complies with the law, we will accept it and put our guarantee on it,” said an agency spokesperson in response to an Inside FHA/VA Lending inquiry. Ginnie’s assurance provides certainty to a subset of VA loans that have been in limbo since June because they could not be delivered into Ginnie mortgage-backed securities. Lawmakers responded to industry calls for a legislative fix last week by voting overwhelmingly to approve H.R. 6737, the “Protect Affordable Mortgages for Veterans Act of 2018.” Introduced by Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-NY, the bill would eliminate the seasoning requirements in the recently enacted Dodd-Frank Act reform legislation, which conflicted with ...

Securitizations of residential property assessed clean energy assessments are performing better than projections made by Kroll Bond Rating Agency when issuance started four years ago, according to the rating service. Meanwhile, predicting prepayment rates remains difficult, KBRA noted in a report released late last week.

The Blackstone Group in the past few months has taken a hard look at the operations of Incenter, a portfolio company it controls that has diversified businesses that include loan and MBS trading/investments as well as servicing brokerage, according to market sources familiar with the situation.

Ginnie Mae issuers produced $36.68 billion of new single-family mortgage-backed securities last month, a modest 5.0 percent gain from July, according to a new Inside FHA/VA Lending analysis and ranking. Through the first eight months of the year, Ginnie issuance was down 11.0 percent from the same period in 2017. The MBS figures do not include FHA home-equity conversion mortgages, and loan amounts are truncated to the lowest $1,000. Purchase mortgages accounted for 75.6 percent of new issuance in August, although volume was up just 1.9 percent from July’s level. On a year-to-date basis, the purchase-mortgage share rose from 65.7 percent in 2017 to 70.0 percent for the first eight months of this year. Total volume, however, was down 5.1 percent. The refinance market has been more wobbly. As of the end of August, refi volume totaled $65.87 billion, down 26.2 percent from the ... [Chart]

Mortgage servicers and investors often complain about long foreclosure timelines in states with a judicial foreclosure process, but Moody’s Investors Service said the delays will only marginally increase losses on residential MBS.

Ginnie Mae officials described a two-pronged approach to assuring MBS investors that the agency is protecting their interests from the risk that issuers might fail to deliver principal and interest payments in a timely manner.