Officials at Impac Mortgage Holdings said originations of non-qualified mortgages are a “primary focus” for the lender this year. Impac has been one of the most prominent non-QM lenders, but production remains relatively low. Impac originated $48.0 million in non-QMs in the third quarter of 2015, the most recent figures available. The lender refers to these originations as AltQM products. Impac focused its early non-QM efforts in the wholesale channel and started offering non-QMs via ...

Parkside Mortgage Trust recently started operations with plans to acquire non-agency mortgages, including non-qualified mortgages. The first loan acquired by the real estate investment trust was a jumbo QM. Officials at PMT said Parkside Lending, an affiliate of the REIT, will service the mortgages. “This effort has been in the works for the past three years and we’re proud that it has finally come to fruition,” said Matthew Ostrander, president and chairman of PMT. “We’re excited to be entering ...

Redwood Trust announced last week that it will discontinue acquiring and aggregating conforming mortgages for resale to the government-sponsored enterprises. Officials at the real estate investment trust stressed that Redwood’s jumbo operations will continue. Redwood started selling conforming mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2014, acquiring $4.0 billion in conforming loans during the year along with $5.0 billion in jumbos. Through three quarters in 2015, Redwood had ...

Bowing to pressure from investors – in particular, Carl Icahn – American International Group this week rolled out a blueprint to increase shareholder value, including a partial spin-off of its top-ranked mortgage insurance division, United Guaranty Corp. Although both AIG and UGC were not entertaining questions on the details, a spinoff of the MI business could come by mid-year with up to 19.9 percent of the unit being sold to the public. Eventually, AIG said...

Goldman Sachs last week announced it has agreed to a $5.1 billion settlement, the largest regulatory penalty in the firm’s history, concluding an investigation brought by the Residential MBS Working Group of the U.S. Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force. The agreement in principle is poised to resolve actual and potential civil claims by the U.S. Department of Justice, the New York and Illinois attorneys general, the National Credit Union Administration (as conservator for several failed credit unions) and the Federal Home Loan Banks of Chicago and Seattle. At issue are...

Compliance violations with a disclosure rule that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau implemented in October continue to cause problems for non-agency mortgages in the secondary market. The CFPB and Fitch Ratings separately provided guidance recently regarding the so-called TRID integrated disclosure rule that could help industry participants get more comfortable with TRID. There have been reports that some buyers of non-agency mortgages have balked at ...

The non-agency mortgage-backed security market could be revived this year by economic factors rather than efforts by Congress or industry participants, according to analysts. The non-agency share of mortgage originations has been relatively strong in recent years, but the loans were largely held in bank portfolios instead of included in non-agency MBS. Legislative reform of the government-sponsored enterprises and potential incentives for non-agency MBS issuance look ...

Issuers of jumbo mortgage-backed securities stuck with plain vanilla mortgages in 2015, according to a new analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. Meanwhile, a wide variety of lenders contributed to jumbo MBS last year, with only one bank accounting for an outsized share of contributions. First Republic Bank was the top originator of jumbo mortgages that were securitized in 2015, accounting for nearly 20 percent of all jumbo MBS issuance ... [Includes two data charts]

The performance risks posed by a new breed of alternative-documentation mortgages are likely much lower than the mayhem caused by reduced-documentation mortgages originated before the financial crisis, according to Moody’s Investors Service. While most lenders verify the borrower’s income and assets used to qualify for mortgages, some non-agency lenders are willing to originate loans with less than full documentation. Lenders allowing for alt-doc underwriting typically ...

The most active issuer of jumbo mortgage-backed securities in 2015, based on the number of deals sold, is set to issue the first jumbo MBS of the year. Two Harbors Investment is preparing a $304.75 million deal, according to presale reports. A presale report from Standard & Poor’s on the deal on Jan. 4 ended a span of 31 days without a presale report for a new jumbo MBS. Fitch Ratings published a presale report on the same deal the following day. The deal will mark the first ...