During the second quarter, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Veterans Affairs home loan guaranty program all saw significant increases in production of “agency jumbo” loans – mortgages with loan amounts exceeding the baseline $417,000 agency loan limit. A new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis reveals that the agencies’ combined jumbo production, including FHA activity, rose 53.3 percent to $36.2 billion during the second quarter. That represented the highest quarterly total since “emergency” high-cost loan limits were established in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The FHA had...[Includes three data tables]

The effort by some non-agency MBS investors to create an entity to protect investors took a step forward as a sample deal-agent agreement was circulated late last week in advance of the ABS East conference in Miami. A deal agent would be tasked with protecting the interests of investors in non-agency MBS, including duties of care and loyalty. The leaders of the effort, James Callahan, a principal at Pentalpha Global and Alessandro Pagani, head of securitized assets at Loomis Sayles & Company, said the market should adopt the agreement as the template for new non-agency MBS. However, the sample agreement leaves...

Five years have passed since the Federal Housing Finance Agency filed suit against 18 Wall Street firms and banks for peddling nonprime MBS to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the years leading up to the housing crisis. All of the defendants have settled or lost with one glaring exception: Royal Bank of Scotland. As for when (and if) RBS will settle, that’s a different and complicated matter. The bank is presently owned by the British government, which took control of it during the financial crisis. In other words, any settlement might entail taxpayer money and cause a political controversy in the U.K. And the bill could be...

JPMorgan Chase is set to end another lull in the issuance of jumbo mortgage-backed securities. The $395.40 million JPMorgan Mortgage Trust 2016-3 is scheduled to be issued next week, according to a presale report from Fitch Ratings. The most recently issued jumbo MBS priced in mid-August and was also from Chase. Only two firms with active conduits have issued jumbo MBS this year: Chase and Redwood Trust. Two Harbors Investment and WinWater Home Mortgage issued ...

The nonprime mortgage-backed security issued last week by Lone Star Funds priced at tighter spreads than the deal the company issued in June, indicating increased demand among investors. The $217.00 million COLT 2016-2 was also larger than the previous $161.40 million deal from Lone Star. According to Deutsche Bank Securities, spreads of A-1 tranche and A-2 tranche in COLT 2016-2 were respectively priced at 130 basis points and 175 bps, significantly tighter than ...

Originations of non-qualified mortgages could reach $100.0 billion a year, according to officials at three prominent nonprime lenders. Since QM standards from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau took effect at the start of 2014, non-QMs such as jumbo mortgages with interest-only terms have predominantly gone to affluent borrowers. However, officials at Angel Oak Mortgage Solutions, Deephaven Mortgage and Citadel Servicing see promise in originations for ...

Sterling Bank & Trust does limited income documentation under its bank statement program but the bank said there have been zero delinquencies on the nearly $1.00 billion in such loans the bank has funded in the past five years. Some $33.2 million in loans from Sterling’s Advantage Home Ownership Program were included in the $217.0 million non-agency mortgage-backed security issued by Lone Star Funds last week. Rating reports on the MBS by DBRS and Fitch Ratings provided ...

CORRECTION: Redwood Trust’s Choice program doesn’t allow for stated-income documentation, as originally reported in the Sept. 9, 2016, issue of Inside Nonconforming Markets. And Redwood does allow underwriting exceptions for Choice mortgages, a change that was made after the program was introduced. The baseline conforming loan limit for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will likely go up to about $422,000 in 2017, according to an Inside ... [Includes four briefs]

Some residential mortgage-backed securities loan originators are moving away from performing internal post-acquisition quality control loan reviews in lieu of obtaining feedback from their whole loan investors, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service. “Some aggregators are relying more on their investors for quality control feedback,” said Moody’s. The ratings service identified in particular Redwood Residential Acquisition Corp. and JPMorgan Mortgage Acquisition Corp., which it said “are relying more on feedback from whole loan investors to monitor the quality of due diligence firm loan reviews, as opposed to conducting their own internal reviews, since a large portion of their acquisitions are sold in whole-loan trades.” Moody’s noted...

Bank and thrift holdings of non-agency ABS fell slightly during the second quarter, but the industry is not backing away from the consumer credit space. Depositories prefer to hold these assets in unsecuritized form on their balance sheets. A new Inside MBS & ABS analysis of call-report data shows that banks and thrifts held $130.98 billion of non-mortgage ABS at the end of June. That was down 0.7 percent from March and represented the 10th consecutive quarterly decline since the end of 2013, when the industry’s ABS holdings hit their all-time peak. According to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the supply of non-mortgage ABS debt outstanding actually rose...[Includes two data tables]