WinWater Home Mortgage, a relatively new jumbo conduit, is preparing to issue a $249.47 million jumbo mortgage-backed security. The deal is set to receive AAA ratings from DBRS, Kroll Bond Rating Agency and Standard & Poor’s despite concerns about the lack of performance data for WinWater and the firm’s “limited financial capacity.” WinWater is partly owned by principals of Premium Point Investments, a residential mortgage investment advisor ...

CitiMortgage is preparing to issue its first jumbo mortgage-backed security of the year, a $217.99 million deal largely backed by mortgages originated by brokers. The top contributors to Citigroup Mortgage Loan Trust 2014-J1 are Stearns Lending (33.5 percent), Nationstar Mortgage (30.3 percent) and Freedom Mortgage (11.3 percent). The deal is set to receive AAA ratings from DBRS and Fitch Ratings with credit enhancement of 9.525 percent on the super-senior tranche ...

Two firms plan to issue jumbo mortgage-backed securities next week, breaking a seven-week lull in issuance. However, jumbo MBS activity is expected to remain suppressed due to a number of factors, including dominance by the government-sponsored enterprises. “The idea that reform of the GSEs could pave the way for the private market’s return seems to have faded,” according to analysts at Standard & Poor’s. The rating service pointed to moves by ...

Delinquencies on the $347 million jumbo mortgage-backed security Redwood Trust issued in April spiked recently to 3.37 percent. That’s the highest delinquency rate seen on any jumbo MBS issued since 2010. However, Fitch Ratings said the spike was an aberration, caused by a servicing transfer, not sudden poor performance by pristine jumbo borrowers. “Early delinquency related to servicing transfers in recent residential MBS is typically due to ...

AmeriHome Mortgage plans to offer non-agency correspondent mortgages with debt-to-income ratios as high as 55 percent beginning in the fourth quarter of 2014, according to officials at the nonbank. The lender was sold by Impac Mortgage Holdings earlier this year and is now headed by James Furash, the former head of the banking unit at Countrywide Financial. In July, AmeriHome plans to start offering a 5/1 adjustable-rate mortgage with ... [Includes five briefs]

In a few weeks, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will release second quarter results, likely posting positive earnings, but the revenue figures will not include any major boost from legal settlements or the recapture of previously set-aside loan loss reserves. In short, what the two government-sponsored enterprises report in earnings for the second quarter should reflect what their operating profits might look like going forward, given normal market conditions. However, over the past six months, the CEOs of Fannie and Freddie and top officials at the Treasury Department – the owner of its senior preferred shares – have consistently argued...

Production of “agency jumbo” mortgages fell sharply in the first quarter of 2014 and is likely to drop even more as new FHA loan limits show up in endorsement data. According to a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA saw $10.5 billion in single-family business with loan amounts exceeding the traditional agency limit of $417,000 during the first quarter of 2014. That was down 30.6 percent from the fourth quarter. It was also the lowest three-month volume since the fourth quarter of 2008, not long after dramatically higher “emergency” loan limits were put in place by the agencies. In comparison, originations of non-agency jumbo loans fell...[Includes three data charts]

It looks like the Securities and Exchange Commission has yielded to the majority view of the other federal regulators and agreed to a simplified qualified residential mortgage definition that could make it easier for issuers of non-agency MBS. The SEC dropped its insistence on a downpayment requirement, according to an account this week in the Wall Street Journal. In exchange, the other federal agencies involved in the rulemaking agreed to revisit the QRM issue two years after the final risk-retention rule goes into effect. Deals backed...

The International Organization of Securities Commissions is working on a set of “good practices” to provide to the vast majority of the world’s securities regulators as part of an effort to prompt securities investors to reduce their reliance on credit ratings. While participants in the U.S. structured finance industry suggest that reliance on credit ratings diminished after the financial crisis, many funds continue to have guidelines that reference credit ratings. Some investors, for example, couldn’t buy into risk-sharing transactions from the government-sponsored enterprises unless the deals received investment-grade ratings. IOSCO recently issued...

Strong appetite from lenders for jumbo mortgages wasn’t enough to overcome the overall decline in mortgage production in the first quarter of 2014. Jumbo originations declined by 21.4 percent compared with the fourth quarter of 2013, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. And the estimated $44.0 billion in jumbos originated in the first quarter was down by 31.3 percent compared with the same period in 2013. The non-agency jumbo sector has gained some market share during that time as overall production has declined even more. Jumbos accounted for 18.7 percent of total originations in the first quarter of 2014, a level not seen since 2004. Wells Fargo remained...[Includes one data chart]