“The new year has all of us in the MSR market off to a running start as we see increases in mortgage rates and lower originations leading to greater demand, allowing for improved pricing of the MSR asset,” said Tom Piercy, managing director of Incenter Mortgage Advisors, Denver.
Movement locked rates on $1.1 billion of mortgages in January, an 11 percent increase from the same month a year ago. It called the improvement an "indicator of future growth in February and March.”
The credit box in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lending continued to widen – at a glacial rate – during 2017, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of mortgage-backed securities disclosure data. The easing trend seemed to lose momentum slightly in the fourth quarter, as more government-sponsored enterprise business landed in the middle-risk categories. For the full year, 12.13 percent of GSE purchase loans were in the highest-risk ... [Includes two data charts]
Look for more sales of mortgage-origination platforms this year, said Jeffrey Levine, a managing director at Houlihan Lokey and co-head of the firm’s financial institutions group. He noted that in recent years, merger-and-acquisition activity has been concentrated on transfers of legacy mortgage servicing rights. But as interest rates have risen, buyers and sellers are focused on origination franchises. Independent companies that have origination assets and servicing also look to be in play ...
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