A handful of firms service the majority of loans included in jumbo mortgage-backed securities issued since 2010. Analysts at Wells Fargo Securities noted that prepayment rates vary somewhat among the servicers, offering pockets of value for jumbo MBS investors. Wells Fargo analysts said $25.26 billion in mortgages included in jumbo MBS issued in 2010 and beyond remain outstanding. The top five servicers handle 83.3 percent of the loans, with Cenlar alone claiming ...

The monitor of a $2.0 billion settlement involving Ocwen Financial revealed last week that the nonbank was found to have failed another metric under the settlement. However, the monitor noted that Ocwen has worked to address many of the issues that have dogged the company over the past year. The monitor re-tested Ocwen on a number of metrics under the settlement due to concerns that were raised about the integrity of the servicer’s internal review group ...

The $269.29 million jumbo mortgage-backed security that Shellpoint Partners plans to issue next week will be the first to include certain recommendations from the RMBS 3.0 project, according to the Structured Finance Industry Group. Eric Kaplan, a managing director at Shellpoint, helped launch the SFIG’s RMBS 3.0 effort. The representations and warranties on Shellpoint Co-Originator Trust 2015-1 will include a mandatory review upon ... [Includes three briefs]

A federal appeals court in New Orleans has overturned a 2014 district court ruling, reviving two government MBS lawsuits that were initially dismissed because they were filed past the state’s established time limit. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s separate lawsuits against RBS Securities Inc., on one hand, and against Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs, were both filed on Aug. 17, 2012. The complaints alleged that the banks misled investors about the credit quality of the mortgage loans that backed $840 million in non-agency MBS. The district court’s decision to dismiss, however, turned on...

Standard & Poor’s ranked as the most active rating service in the non-mortgage ABS market at the midway mark in 2015, but came in last in the non-agency MBS sector. S&P provided ratings on $63.55 billion of non-mortgage ABS issued during the first half of the year, or 60.3 percent of total issuance. That was off slightly from its 64.1 percent market share for all of last year. The company has gotten more active in rating credit card deals, but has lost some of its share in vehicle finance and business loan ABS. Fitch was...[Includes two data tables]

More issuers are stepping up to the plate by creating securities collateralized by nonperforming residential loans, but so far the action has mostly taken place in the private-placement market. “There have been a bunch of securitizations of NPLs lately,” one trader told Inside MBS & ABS, “but it’s all been Reg. 144 filings,” a reference to the Securities and Exchange Commission rule that allows for the public resale of restricted collateral if a number of conditions are met ...

Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs this week announced it has set aside $1.45 billion for legal expenses for the second quarter of 2015, bringing its total anticipated legal costs so far to $5.9 billion to settle Department of Justice claims stemming from the sale of vintage non-agency MBS. A good chunk of that figure – $270 million – is expected to be tapped to resolve residential MBS litigation brought by pension funds led by NECA-IBEW Health & Welfare Fund of Illinois ...

Freddie Mac’s first Whole Loan Securities deal was met with strong demand from investors, according to industry analysts. The transaction differed in a number of ways from the risk-sharing deals the government-sponsored enterprises have issued, as its structure was more like a non-agency MBS. The $300.27 million WLS 2015-SC01 included senior tranches with a total balance of $278 million and credit enhancement of 7.50 percent. Investors could purchase the senior ...

Close to one-third of the $154.79 billion in non-agency MBS serviced by Ocwen Financial is subject to potential servicing transfers due to downgrades to the firm’s servicer ratings and actions by investors. However, Ocwen has managed to retain servicing on a vast majority of the 119 deals thus far, helped by the proceeds the company delivers to non-agency MBS investors. Ocwen faces the potential loss of non-agency MBS servicing on two fronts. Some $43.1 billion ...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reduced their retained mortgage portfolios by a combined $44.4 billion during the second quarter, a period during which the government-sponsored enterprises posted substantial increases in net earnings. Freddie Mac’s non-agency MBS holdings declined 11.6 percent, while its un-securitized whole-loan portfolio dropped 3.0 percent. The GSE sold $3.3 billion of non-agency MBS and securitized $2.1 billion of single-family ... [Includes one data chart]