A typical jumbo mortgage-backed security is stronger in many ways than the non-agency MBS-like transaction Freddie Mac issued at the end of July, according to a recent analysis by Andrew Davidson & Co. However, the Freddie deal benefitted from a wrap provided by the government-sponsored enterprise. Freddie Mac Whole Loan Securities Trust Series 2015 SC01 was backed by mortgages with an unpaid principal balance of $302.96 million. The risk-sharing transaction was structured as a cash securitization with $278 million in senior certificates guaranteed by Freddie and approximately $23 million in unguaranteed subordinate certificates. Andrew Davidson compared...

Parkside Lending’s insurance subsidiary recently became a member of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Cincinnati. Parkside said access to FHLBank advances will help provide leverage to Parkside Mortgage Trust, a real estate investment trust. Officials at Parkside wouldn’t address the amount of advances PSL Insurance Company will have access to or whether the advances will help fund originations of non-agency mortgages. In addition to conventional conforming offerings, Parkside originates non-qualified mortgages. Resitrader recently launched...[Includes four briefs]

The unpaid principal balance on VA loans securitized in 3Q15 Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities totaled $426.9 billion, up 5.1 percent from the previous quarter and 17.3 percent more year-over-year. Wells Fargo serviced $114.4 billion of VA collateral at Sept. 30, 2.0 percent up from the prior quarter. It was good enough for a commanding 26.8 percent of the market. The only other megabank among the top five servicers in this segment was fifth-place Chase Home Finance, which closed the quarter with $16.8 billion and a 3.9 percent market share. It saw portfolio declines on both quarterly and year-over-year bases. USAA Federal Savings Bank, in third place, accounted for $24.1 billion, or 5.6 percent of the VA-backed MBS servicing market. Nonbanks PennyMac, in second place, and fourth-ranked Freedom Mortgage combined for 11.0 percent of the ... [ 1 chart ]

Servicing of FHA loans pooled into Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities rose 2.1 percent in the third quarter of 2015. Three megabanks in the top five-servicer tier accounted for a significant share of the market. Ginnie Mae servicers of FHA collateral reported $969.0 billion outstanding at Sept. 30, with Wells Fargo accounting for 27.9 percent of total servicing volume. Wells Fargo, Chase Home Finance (#2) and Bank of America (#5) combined to service 39.3 percent of FHA outstanding as of the end of the quarter. PennyMac Corp. closed the quarter with a $57.7 billion FHA servicing portfolio, good enough for third place and 6.0 percent of the market. Fourth-ranked NationStar Mortgage reported a $53.6 billion servicing portfolio at the end of the ... [ 1 chart ]

While federal regulators issued a final rule setting risk-retention requirements for a variety of MBS and ABS in December 2014, uncertainty regarding implementation persists. Industry participants are seeking guidance from regulators on a variety of issues, including the application of risk retention to asset classes that weren’t prevalent when the Dodd-Frank Act was drafted. “It’s absolutely astonishing how much becomes unclear when you actually sit down to build a risk-retention solution,” Rick Jones, chair of finance and real estate groups at the Dechert law firm, said in a recent commentary. He noted...

Over the next few weeks, publicly traded real estate investment trusts that specialize in residential mortgages will begin reporting third quarter earnings and the outlook is hardly rosy. “Another difficult quarter for mREITs is behind us,” wrote Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Michael Widner and his team of researchers. “Rate uncertainty has been and remains the sector’s biggest challenge.” In other words, the slow march downward in rates has been...

Did anyone expect the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury to be hovering at just over 2.0 percent as November approached? Not really, but the recent downdraft in rates has once again caused bond prices – MBS in particular – to increase, a development warming the hearts of investors. Then again, MBS investors hedging their positions might be...

With action from Congress to reform the government-sponsored enterprises not expected in the next year and a half, the GSEs’ risk-sharing activities have been seen by some as a de facto housing finance reform program. Industry participants and members of Congress suggest that the risk-sharing initiatives aren’t a replacement for GSE reform, even while calling for adjustments to the programs. Kevin Chavers, a managing director at BlackRock, said the back-end ...

The IRS approved Bank of America’s $8.5 billion settlement involving vintage non-agency mortgage-backed securities this week. The approval paves the way for investors to receive funds from a settlement that was announced in 2011. Mortgages play a role in a dispute between a former internal auditor at BofI Holding and the bank. Matt Erhart, the former auditor, filed a federal lawsuit this week with a wide range of allegations, including that BofI ... [Includes two briefs]

Nonbanks comprised a significant portion of Ginnie Mae business as independent mortgage companies replaced banks as primary securitizers of FHA and VA loans. In the third quarter of 2015, mortgage companies accounted for 60.8 percent of VA loans and 67.1 percent of FHA loans securitized in Ginnie pools. For mortgage companies, production of Ginnie mortgage-backed securities backed by FHA loans increased by 5.0 percent in the third quarter from the previous quarter and was up a whopping 118.1 percent during the first nine months of 2015 over the same period last year. Nonbank securitization of VA loans rose by a modest 1.5 percent quarter over quarter and by 83.6 percent over the nine-month period compared to the same period last year. Megabanks, whose assets exceed $1 trillion, were the second largest issuers of Ginnie Mae MBS, accounting for less than ... [3 charts]