Wells Fargo was the top jumbo lender in 2010, according to a ranking by Inside Nonconforming Markets based on Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data compiled by ComplianceTech/Lending Patterns. Wells had $40.87 billion in originations greater than the $417,000 standard conforming loan limit in 2010. ... [Includes one data chart]

Home Equity Conversion Mortgage lenders may now use certain financial assessment criteria in qualifying consumers for a HECM loan prior to FHA’s publication of its own guidance. Officials from the Department of Housing and Urban Development broke the news during the recent National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association annual conference in Boston. They said the new underwriting assessment tool would help ensure borrowers can pay required taxes and insurance on their homes. The notification followed the unveiling of the NRMLA’s recommended underwriting guidance. In a previous email notice to industry participants, Acting Assistant Secretary of Housing/FHA Commissioner Carol Galante indicated that ...

“We have to reduce uncertainty to bring private capital back,” Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s annual convention last week in Chicago. Industry participants remain divided on if or when non-agency securitization will resume in a significant manner. Daniel Arrigoni, president and CEO of U.S. Bank Home Mortgage, said U.S. Bank and other lenders must think about developing non-agency securitization capabilities as the federal government works toward reducing its involvement in housing finance. ...

A regulatory scare from the Securities and Exchange Commission may end up being much less of a challenge for real estate investment trusts than the stiff competition they face from bank portfolios, according to experts at the ABS East conference sponsored by Information Management Network this week in Miami Beach, FL. In September, the SEC rattled the mortgage REIT sector – which has struggled to gain a foothold in the nonconforming mortgage market – by launching a formal fact-finding mission on maintaining the exemption REITs enjoy from the Investment Company Act. ...

The lower loan limits instituted this month for conforming mortgages opened a number of regional opportunities for non-agency lenders. As of Oct. 1, 250 counties have lower government-sponsored enterprise loan limits compared with the conforming loan limits of 2010, according to an analysis by affiliated publication Inside Mortgage Finance. Michael Fratantoni, vice president of single-family research and policy development at the Mortgage Bankers Association, said the portion of the market newly eligible only for non-agency financing is significant in comparison to the amount of non-agency jumbo originations in recent years. ... [includes one data chart]

Bexil American Mortgage, a newly formed originator, plans to originate non-agency mortgages and sell them to Citi, Wells Fargo and PennyMac. John Robbins, president of Bexil American Mortgage, said the stagnant non-agency securitization market has not completely stopped sales of jumbo mortgages. “There are active investors for those products today,” he said last week on a call with investors. ...

In a somewhat unusual announcement last week, Walter Investment Management said it was servicing approximately 910,000 loans representing approximately $59.0 billion of unpaid principal balance as of the end of the third quarter of 2011. The announcement was unusual because that was the extent of the statement. “We believe the major increase in the servicing portfolio could be due to Walter being allocated a portion of the servicing rights related to the Fannie Mae/Bank of America deal, whereby Bank of America sold the servicing rights to 400,000 loans to Fannie Mae,” said analysts at FBR Capital Markets. ...

Acquisitions of large non-agency portfolios by Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase resulted in poor servicing performance, according to a new analysis by Moody’s Investors Service. Successful borrower-contact initiatives, meanwhile, resulted in significantly improved servicing performance for others. “Integrating the servicing platforms, employees, processes, and technologies into their servicing operations overwhelmed the banks, reducing their ability to proactively address the increased number of problem loans in their combined portfolios,” Moody’s said. ...

Significant declines in jumbo mortgage-backed security prices tracked by the PrimeX index in recent weeks were due to investor panic, not collateral fundamentals, according to industry analysts. The sell-off began earlier this month after Fitch Ratings downgraded a number of jumbo securities and warned of negative equity, prompting fears of strategic defaults. Prices on the usually steady PrimeX index fell by as much as 10.0 percent from the beginning of October. Some of the sub-indices even fell below par for the first time. ... [includes one data chart]

The top three rate-spread lenders in 2010 were major banks – largely because of the sheer size of their total originations rather than a focus on rate-spread lending, according to an analysis of new Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data by ComplianceTech and Inside Nonconforming Markets. Meanwhile, Texas accounted for the largest share of rate-spread lending during the year. ... [includes two data charts]