The Department of Veterans Affairs has drafted a proposed rule to curb predatory loan churning. The draft rule is “well on its way through concurrence with VA and the Office of Management and Budget,” said Jeff London, director of the VA Loan Guaranty Service, during an interview at the agency’s 19t Annual Lender Conference in Miami recently. He did not specify a publication date but said the proposed rule will be published “fairly soon.” Churning, or serial refinancing, involves multiple refinances of the same loan within short periods with no clear benefit to the borrower. In addition, churning triggers rapid prepayments in Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities to the detriment of investors and makes it difficult to price MBS appropriately. London declined to provide details about the rule’s content but said veterans and taxpayers would be protected. VA looked at a range of things that were common in the ...
Issuance of prime jumbo mortgage-backed securities is on the rise but underwriting standards for loans in the deals aren’t changing much, according to a new analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. Some $4.23 billion of prime jumbo MBS was issued in the first quarter of 2018, the highest quarterly volume for the sector since the first three months of 2015. Issuers in the sector have largely maintained super-prime underwriting standards since the financial crisis ... [Includes two data charts]
Chimera Investment, JPMorgan Chase and Redwood Trust plan to issue new prime non-agency mortgage-backed securities in the coming weeks, adding to momentum in a market where most issuers are optimistic about production volume. The planned CIM Trust 2018-J1 would mark a return to the jumbo MBS market for Chimera. The real estate investment trust has focused its issuance efforts on seasoned mortgages in recent years after dabbling in jumbo MBS around 2012 ...
Full third-party due diligence reviews were completed on only 20.0 percent of the loans being pooled by Flagstar Bank into a new non-agency mortgage-backed security. Rating services delivered mixed assessments of the due diligence sampling rate, which could set a standard for the market. The $704.1 million Flagstar Mortgage Trust 2018-2 is scheduled to close at the end of the month. DBRS, Fitch Ratings, Kroll Bond Rating Agency and Moody’s Investors Service all ...
SG Capital Partners is set to issue its first rated nonprime mortgage-backed security after bringing to market some unrated deals in recent years and aggregating loans in a rated nonprime MBS issued by a competitor. Morningstar Credit Ratings and S&P Global Ratings assigned preliminary AAA ratings to the planned $140.1 million SG Residential Mortgage Trust 2018-1 last week. Somewhat unusually, the rating services came up with different figures on the share of non-qualified mortgages ...