Angel Oak Capital Advisors is preparing to issue its first non-agency mortgage-backed security of the year backed by non-qualified mortgages, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Tiptree has an agreement to sell jumbo lender Luxury Mortgage in the second half of this year. The buyer and purchase price weren’t disclosed. Citadel Servicing recently loosened underwriting standards on a number of its nonprime ... [Includes four briefs]

Banks and thrifts increased their first-lien holdings by 4.1 percent in 2017, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. Big banks continue to retain jumbo mortgages in portfolio along with some loans eligible for sale to the government-sponsored enterprises. A total of $2.01 trillion in first-lien mortgages were held by banks and thrifts as of the end of 2017, up 1.2 percent from the end of September. Adjustable-rate mortgages ... [Includes one data chart]

Issuance of non-agency mortgage-backed securities backed by non-qualified mortgages could triple this year, according to Jeremy Schneider, a senior director at S&P Global Ratings. According to Inside Nonconforming Markets, $4.08 billion of expanded credit non-agency MBS was issued in 2017, with non-QMs accounting for a large share of the issuance. Schneider and other industry participants discussed non-QMs at the SFIG Vegas conference produced by Information ...

Issuance of jumbo mortgage-backed securities flourished at the start of the year, prompting projections that volume could double compared with 2017, but the market isn’t expected to grow to anywhere near pre-crisis levels. Baron Silverstein, a managing director at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said he expects to see more issuers enter the maket and that issuance could hit $20.0 billion this year. He was speaking at the SFIG Vegas conference produced by Information Management Network and ...

Ocwen Financial plans to resume growing its servicing and originations business by acquiring PHH. The transaction is scheduled to close in the second half of this year. Ocwen plans to acquire PHH with $360.0 million in cash and assume $119.0 million of outstanding corporate debt. According to Ocwen, there will be enough cash on PHH’s balance sheet to fund $260.0 million of the $360.0 million purchase price. Both companies have been struggling ... [Includes one data chart]

After issuing two jumbo mortgage-backed securities in 2017 on a shelf created by Credit Suisse, an affiliate of AIG Asset Management is launching a deal on its own. Pearl Street Mortgage Company 2018-1 looks a lot like previous AIG deals save for the change in shelf registration. However, the planned $446.17 million issuance will have somewhat higher credit enhancement on the senior tranche than the other MBS. The new issuance received preliminary AAA ratings from Fitch Ratings and ...

With comprehensive housing-finance reform looking unlikely to be passed by Congress anytime soon, some industry analysts project that the Trump administration will take administrative actions to shrink the roles of the government-sponsored enterprises. Under a plan detailed last week by the American Enterprise Institute, the GSEs could be eliminated over time without legislation, with the non-agency market filling the void. The “Taxpayer Protection Housing Finance Plan” was ...

Embrace Home Loans hired a former official from Deephaven Mortgage to serve as director of mortgage product innovation. Deephaven has focused its correspondent production on non-qualified mortgages while Embrace is looking to expand its retail products. Parkes Dibble, the new hire, was previously a vice president of capital markets product development at Deephaven. Embrace said Dibble will lead efforts to strengthen the “depth and breadth” of ... [Includes two briefs]

A number of lenders are trying to grow the expanded-credit mortgage market, but top producers in the sector saw an overall decline in originations last year, according to a new ranking by Inside Nonconforming Markets. The 15 top lenders originated $40.96 billion of expanded-credit mortgages last year, down 16.3 percent from 2016. The ECM category consists mostly of non-qualified mortgages and nonprime/Alt A loans that aren’t eligible for sale to the agencies ... [Includes one data chart]

Prices for jumbo mortgages softened near the end of 2017 and then markedly improved in the first two months of this year, according to officials at Redwood Trust. “As they often do, market conditions rebounded in January and we took full advantage,” Dashiell Robinson, an executive vice president at Redwood, said this week during the real estate investment trust’s earnings call. The company priced five non-agency mortgage-backed securities in January and February at much better execution ...