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 ...

A recent ruling by the New York Court of Appeals regarding the statute of limitations for representation-and-warranty claims on non-agency mortgage-backed securities has caused concerns for some participants in the new-issue jumbo MBS market. In ACE Securities v. DB Structured Products, the court ruled that the statute of limitations for claims of breaches of reps and warrants starts when a deal is closed, not when a potential breach is discovered. Lawyers involved in non-agency MBS were divided on how the ruling would impact issuance going forward ...

Downgrades by Standard & Poor’s to numerous servicer ratings for Ocwen Financial could have a significant impact on the nonbank’s servicing operations. The rating service downgraded servicer ratings for Ocwen to “below average” last week, citing continued scrutiny by investors and regulators along with concerns about internal audits at Ocwen. As of the end of the first quarter of 2015, approximately 700 of the 4,100 non-agency servicing agreements handled by Ocwen had criteria regarding minimum servicer ratings ...

The amount of home-equity loans held by banks and thrifts as of the end of the first quarter of 2015 declined slightly compared with the end of 2014, according to the Inside Mortgage Finance Bank Mortgage Database. Banks and thrifts held a combined $974.0 billion in home-equity lines of credit, unused HELOC commitments and closed-end second liens at the end of the first quarter, down 0.9 percent from the previous quarter. Closed-end seconds accounted for 7.5 percent of the holdings, with the remaining balance divided fairly evenly between HELOCs and unused HELOC commitments ... [Includes one data table.]

A new feature Redwood Trust has included in its two most recent jumbo mortgage-backed securities has prompted support from AAA investors along with mixed reactions from rating services. The $356.45 million Sequoia Mortgage Trust 2015-2 issued in April and the $343.21 million Sequoia Mortgage Trust 2015-3 that was issued this week included a unique stop-advance feature. Servicers of the loans won’t be allowed to provide advances of principal and interest on loans that are 120+ days delinquent. The jumbo MBS were rated by Kroll Bond Rating Agency and Moody’s Investors Service ...

With issuance of non-agency mortgage-backed securities unable to keep pace with disappearing volume from vintage deals, bank and thrift holdings of non-agency MBS continue to decline. The holdings were down somewhat more than usual in the first quarter of 2015, suggesting sales by some banks. Banks and thrifts held $111.48 billion in non-agency MBS as of the end of the first quarter of 2015, according to the Inside Mortgage Finance Bank Mortgage Database. The holdings declined by 16.1 percent compared with the first quarter of 2014, including an 11.0 percent decline compared with the fourth quarter of 2014 ... [Includes one data table.]

FHA jumbo loan production rose nearly 36.9 percent in the first quarter, ending the period with $3.8 billion in new volume, according to an Inside FHA/VA Lending analysis of agency data. Volume includes all FHA loans exceeding $417,000. It was also up significantly, 59.6 percent, from the same period a year ago. Purchase loans accounted for 52.8 percent of FHA jumbos originated during the first three months of 2015, and 93 percent were fixed-rate purchase and refinance loans. The top five FHA jumbo lenders – Quicken Loans, Wells Fargo Bank, Prospect Mortgage, Pinnacle Capital Mortgage Corp., and LoanDepot – reported increases on a quarter-to-quarter basis. Together, the elite group accounted for 13.0 percent of the FHA jumbo market. The largest quarter-to-quarter increases were mostly mid-level FHA jumbo lenders. For example, 12th-ranked Freedom Mortgage, a top player in the ... [ 1 chart ]