The rating service reviewed 70 aspects of underwriting, including minimum credit scores, loan limits, tax return standards and appraisal requirements.

Fitch raised its ABS rating share from 55.0 percent for all of 2014 to about the same level it had back in 2013.

Bank holdings of non-agency MBS declined by 16.1 percent compared with the first quarter of 2014...

(*)Hatteras Financial agreed this week to acquire Pingora Asset Management and Pingora Loan Servicing. Hatteras said the acquisition will help the real estate investment trust acquire mortgage servicing rights, including MSRs on the REIT’s jumbo adjustable-rate mortgage flow business ...

Former Goldman Sachs officials sure like the nonprime mortgage space. (It's all about yield.)

The eight banks tracked by the OCC’s Mortgage Metrics report – including Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase – completed 7,571 principal reduction mods in the first quarter...

After just over a year of buying mortgages that don’t meet the qualified-mortgage test, Jeff Lemieux has departed Bayview Asset Management while signaling that a non-QM securitization likely won’t happen any time soon – or even this year. Lemieux, who headed correspondent purchases for Bayview, provided Inside MBS & ABS with a blunt assessment of both non-QM originations and securitizations: “Nothing’s happening.” Lemieux went...

Mortgage industry groups say a proposal from the Conference of State Bank Supervisors to establish capital requirements and other standards for nonbank servicers is unnecessary for an industry that’s already heavily regulated. State regulators proposed the standards in March due to concerns about exceptional growth in recent years by Ocwen Financial, Nationstar Mortgage and other nonbanks ...

Bayview Loan Servicing appears to be one of the few nonbanks offering non-agency products at competitive interest rates and holding the loans in portfolio. The lender has recently been pushing non-agency qualified mortgages and non-QMs for correspondent lenders and wholesalers. Bayview has been in the mortgage business for more than 18 years and is minority-owned by affiliates of The Blackstone Group. The lender offers a number of products for near-miss agency borrowers as well as non-QMs with guidelines that are more forgiving than those offered by jumbo lenders for similar products ...

While the characteristics of loans included in jumbo mortgage-backed securities continue to be strong overall, industry analysts note that there are significant differences in “soft” underwriting guidelines used by lenders. “Not all underwriting guidelines, and exceptions to guidelines, are created equal,” analysts at Morningstar Credit Ratings cautioned in a recent report. “Some originators recently have introduced programs that make qualifying for financing easier and require less income documentation.” The company, which is making a new push to rate jumbo MBS, reviewed the guidelines of a number of the most active jumbo originators and aggregators ...