Real estate investment trusts and new investors in the mortgage business could provide funding for nonconforming lending, but securitization remains challenged, according to various experts at the recent secondary market conference sponsored by the Mortgage Bankers Association. The non-agency mortgage-backed securities market is very subdued, said Laurie Goodman, director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute. Issuance has been running at about ...

The strong performance of jumbo mortgages originated in recent years is due to more than just focusing on borrowers with healthy credit scores, loan-to-value ratios and debt-to-income ratios, according to Moody’s Investors Service. The analysts said “soft” qualitative underwriting factors play a major role in jumbo performance. Qualitative factors considered by jumbo lenders include the absence of negative events in a borrower’s credit history, the number of unblemished lines of credit and ...

JPMorgan Chase and Credit Suisse are coming to market with separate jumbo mortgage-backed securities that have some sharp differences in terms of collateral. The $379.78 million JPMorgan Mortgage Trust 2015-3 includes some unique characteristics such as a handful of loans with combined loan-to-value ratios above 80.0 percent and some interest-only mortgages. While the average combined LTV ratio for mortgages to be included in the deal is 69.9 percent, 15 mortgages ...

Servicing on four non-agency mortgage-backed securities will be transferred from Ocwen Financial to Select Portfolio Servicing, according to Moody’s Investors Service. Investors in the MBS voted to transfer servicing on the 3,490 mortgages in the deals. The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Ocwen and potentially other servicers regarding the use of collection agents. In a quarterly report filed last week, Ocwen said it received a letter from ... [Includes five briefs]

Commercial banks and thrifts reported robust growth in their MBS portfolios during early 2015, including a special appetite for Ginnie Mae MBS, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis of call-report data. Commercial banks and thrifts held $1.579 trillion of residential MBS at the end of March, a 2.6 percent increase from the previous quarter. It was the industry’s biggest MBS portfolio since the third quarter of 2012, when banks and thrifts held a record $1.617 trillion of mortgage securities. The biggest gain was...[Includes two data tables]

Industry participants, both on their own and with help from the Treasury Department, continue to work on reforms to attract investors to buy new non-agency MBS. Servicing standards will likely play a key role in the reforms, though progress has been slow. The Structured Finance Industry Group published its first RMBS 3.0 “green paper” in August 2014 with a follow-up in November. The Treasury Department has been working with industry participants toward the issuance of a benchmark non-agency MBS since at least September 2014. Analysts at Fitch Ratings stressed...

Nomura Holdings Inc. is mulling an appeal following last week’s court order that it, along with RBS Securities, pay Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac a total of $805.1 million to resolve claims arising from the pre-crisis sale of non-agency MBS to the government-sponsored enterprises. Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York rendered the judgment May 11 after a three-week bench trial in which she found Nomura and RBS liable for the claims brought by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The MBS were backed by mortgages with an unpaid principal balance of about $2.05 billion at the time of purchase. Nomura and RBS, which underwrote four of the seven MBS deals at issue, provided...

A new regulatory relief bill drafted by Sen. Richard Shelby, R-AL, would guarantee that the common securitization platform project managed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be open to all MBS issuers “as soon as practicable,” and structured as a nonprofit utility. The legislation, which also expands the risk-transfer activities of the two government-sponsored enterprises, lays the groundwork for the CSP being transferred away from the GSEs and managed by a third-party provider. But that doesn’t mean...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is trying to put a dollar amount on damages it believes Nomura Holdings and RBS Securities should pay after a federal judge found the companies liable in connection with Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s pre-crisis investments in non-agency MBS. Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said the complex case boiled down to whether the defendants accurately described in the offering documents the mortgages that underlie the securities sold to the government-sponsored enterprises. It was...

With the April acquisition of Home Loan Servicing Solutions’ assets and liabilities, New Residential gained a significant portion of the clean-up call rights for outstanding non-agency MBS. Officials at the real estate investment trust said New Residential plans to execute the call rights and acquire more rights as the MBS feature presents strong profit potential. New Residential owns the clean-up call rights on more than 2,100 non-agency MBS with an outstanding balance of about $235 billion. That’s about 34 percent of the non-agency MBS market. “This should be...