Mortgage employment has risen by just over 5 percent the past year while loan production is on track to increase 33 percent from 2014 – a sign that residential lenders continue to hire as few workers as possible and use outsourcing firms. According to interviews conducted by Inside Mortgage Trends over the past week, it appears that demand for experienced loan officers will remain strong in the coming year, but servicing staffs will continue to shrink. Mortgage recruiter ...

Six months after rolling out an “unsecured” consumer loan, loanDepot has already funded $250 million worth of loans, and issued a $150 million security backed by the collateral. Will other nonbank mortgage lenders follow suit? The short answer to that question is yes, probably, but it remains to be seen whether nonbanks will have the stomach for the risk, though several executives interviewed by Inside Mortgage Trends concede that, in the end, the yield on such products ...

The Urban Institute has suggested separating FHA’s reverse mortgage business from future actuarial audits of the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund because it is producing a skewed picture of MMIF finances. In a recent blog, Laurie Goodman, director of the institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center, said including the highly volatile and unpredictable Home Equity Conversion Mortgage portfolio in FHA’s solvency calculation severely distorts the fund’s true financial condition ...

Loan modifications and other loss mitigation efforts continued to decline in the third quarter as mortgage performance improved. Servicers still face pressure on loss mitigation efforts, particularly with the Home Affordable Modification Program. Some 98,074 loan mods were completed in the third quarter of 2015, according to data released by Hope Now this week. Mod activity declined by 18.0 percent compared with the previous quarter and was down 13.3 percent from a year ago ...

Commercial banks and savings institutions continued to backpedal away from the business of servicing residential mortgages for other investors during the third quarter, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of bank call reports. Banks and thrifts serviced a total of $4.139 trillion of home mortgages for other investors at the end of September, most of them pooled in mortgage-backed securities. That was down 1.2 percent from June and off ... [Includes one data chart]

At the same time, credit standards – at least in the agency market – have eased only slightly over the past two years...

First-time homebuyers are reportedly sitting on the sidelines and have dropped to their lowest levels in three decades, according to the National Association of Realtors. In its latest annual survey of buyers and sellers, NAR noted that the share of first-time buyers declined to 32 percent, from 33 percent a year ago and the lowest since first-time buyers spiraled down to 30 percent in 1987. But not so fast, says Edward Pinto, former chief credit officer of Fannie Mae and co-director and chief risk officer of the International Center on Housing Risk at the American Enterprise Institute, who disputes NAR’s data and describes the first-time buyer market as “booming.” “The buyers are...

Among the top five jumbo lenders, only Chase was able to increase its production between the second quarter and the third quarter.

UWM may soon surpass Stearns Lending to become the largest wholesale-broker lender in the nation...

ARM activity continues to be low at just 6.1 percent of new applications.