The House Financial Services Committee last week spent three days marking up the Republican majority’s alternative to the Dodd-Frank Act. H.R. 10, the Financial CHOICE Act, introduced late last month by committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, would make a number of changes to the mortgage regulatory landscape. One provision would provide a safe harbor against litigation for residential mortgages held on the lender’s balance sheet since the origination of the loan if the mortgage fails to comply with ability-to-repay requirements. The measure also would revise the definition of “points and fees” under the Truth in Lending Act to exclude fees paid for affiliated business arrangements. Other language in the bill would exempt smaller creditors from TILA’s escrow requirements. Another provision ...
As the House Financial Services Committee prepared to begin marking up the Financial CHOICE Act last week, the Consumer Mortgage Coalition warned lawmakers that the bill would actually interfere with fixing the problems with the CFPB’s mortgage rules, despite the improvements it would otherwise make in the regulatory landscape. “A major problem facing the mortgage industry today is the Rube Goldberg morass of CFPB regulations that are so poorly written that no one knows how to comply,” the CMC said in a letter to lawmakers prior to the hearing. “The mortgage markets will not heal until the CFPB mortgage regulations are fixed. Fixing the regulations requires revising them through the normal notice and comment rulemaking process.” The problem, however, is ...
Rep. Andy Barr, R-KY, last week re-introduced the Portfolio Lending and Mortgage Access Act (H.R. 2226), legislation that aims to expand access to mortgage credit by conferring qualified mortgage status upon loans originated by a bank and held in portfolio. The bill sponsor also hopes that it will discourage the practices that led to the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting taxpayer bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and too-big-to-fail financial institutions. The legislation had some bipartisan support when Barr introduced it in the previous Congress, passing the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 255-174. However, the measure never made it out of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Supporters hope this time around will be ...
After the end of the first quarter, PennyMac acquired a bulk portfolio of Ginnie Mae mortgage servicing rights with an unpaid principal balance of $4.30 billion.
Nearly all publicly held commercial banks and savings associations continued to generate a profit on their mortgage banking activities during the first quarter of 2017, but in most cases it was less than they earned in the past, according to an exclusive analysis and ranking by Inside Mortgage Trends. A group of 26 national banking organizations and regionals reported a combined $2.295 billion in mortgage banking income for the first quarter. Not all institutions ... [Includes one data chart]
The updraft in mortgage interest rates following the November election has bolstered the secondary market in mortgage servicing rights, and business could quicken even more if independent mortgage bankers feel profit pressure from declining margins, according to industry experts. There are more bidders in the market than last year, said David Bennett, a managing director at MountainView Capital Holdings, during a panel session at this week’s secondary market conference ...
Now that Arch Mortgage Insurance is the largest player in the MI space – thanks to its yearend purchase of United Guaranty Corp. – it has no intention of taking it easy. In a recent interview with Inside Mortgage Trends, company CEO of Global Mortgage Insurance and Reinsurance Andrew Rippert touched on future growth, including plans for further expansion into international markets, increasing the firm’s coverage into more non-agency loans, and reinsuring its mortgage risk to ...
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