One sign of just how seriously Congress took the issue of consumer disclosure in the aftermath of the mortgage market meltdown is the dramatic escalation lenders will face for violating the new integrated disclosures from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which take effect Aug. 1, 2015. Consider this: Under the Truth in Lending Act, lenders face a private right of action for violations (along with attorney’s fees and costs), as well as statutory penalties of up to $4,000 for failures to ...

If mortgage bankers want to make money they have to sell loans, and loan sales fell off sharply in the third quarter of 2013, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of bank and thrift call-report data. Banks sold $296.4 billion of home mortgages during the third quarter, a 23.0 percent drop from the previous period. It was the lowest sales volume since the third quarter of 2011 and coincided with an even sharper 41.7 percent decline in mortgage banking income reported by the ... [Includes one data chart]

Understanding best practices is useful for commercial mortgage servicers and other industry participants in fulfilling business responsibilities. However, understanding how best practices develop – and can be improved – is not only valuable but also serves the whole industry, according to a new report from Standard & Poor’s. There are many examples of best practices that could further improve performance and revise market expectations – for example, the investor reporting package, loan modification ...

When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac unveil their fourth-quarter 2013 results in February, the two government-sponsored enterprises are expected to again report strong earnings driven by: higher guaranty fee income, one-time gains tied to legal settlements, and a boost from lower loan-loss reserves. But most of the money will be swept straight into the U.S. Treasury. One of the major factors in the GSEs’ huge 2013 earnings so far – the release of deferred tax assets – will likely be...

In terms of market effect, a DocuTech executive said that because of the new CFPB rules, "credit is going to slow down for a little while, maybe a month or so."

The lender also recently formed a real estate investment trust, Parkside Mortgage Trust. Matt Ostrander, Parkside’s CEO, said the REIT plans to issue a non-agency MBS later this year or in 2015.

Radian's Loan Amount Estimator enables lenders that are capping their debt-to-income ratios at 43 percent to calculate maximum loan amounts and sale prices based on the MI product selected.

Issuance of jumbo mortgage-backed securities has ground to a halt recently but that hasn’t stopped lenders that were participating in the jumbo MBS market from originating loans. Instead, some have shifted their output of jumbos to whole-loan sales. PrimeLending, W.J. Bradley Mortgage and other jumbo lenders whose loans helped fuel the surge in jumbo MBS issuance in the first half of 2013 have shifted to selling whole loans directly to investors, often banks. Scott Eggen, director of capital markets at PrimeLending ...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development sold 62,062 distressed loans in 2013 through its expanded Distressed Asset Stabilization Program (DASP) to increase recoveries to FHA’s Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund. HUD made 10 offerings of nonperforming FHA-insured loans in a series of quarterly competitive auctions last year, participated in by pre-qualified bidders, including nonprofit organizations. The defaulted single-family mortgages were provided by FHA-approved loan servicers and sold through large national pools and “neighborhood stabilization outcome” pools. The NSO pools consist of loans in ...

The FHA's recently updated manual underwriting standards provide some objective criteria for qualifying more borrowers but, at the same time, some of those standards could bar certain people from obtaining an FHA mortgage, according to compliance experts. A key change in the guidelines is the lowering of the credit score threshold from 620 to 580 to allow manually underwritten borrowers – those that have received a “refer” recommendation from FHA’s Total Mortgage Scorecard or those that were not scored because they did not have credit scores – to use compensating factors in order to ...