With mortgage rates at their highest level in more than two years, the long-awaited boom in mergers and acquisitions may finally be here. But don’t expect sellers to accept just any price. “M&A is picking up,” said Larry Charbonneau, who runs a boutique advisory firm, Charbonneau & Associates. “The big fish want to buy the small ones, but the small ones don’t know if it’s in their best interest to sell yet.” Charbonneau points out...

With origination profits leveling off, some mortgage bankers are looking to cash out. But can they still get top dollar?

Commercial banks and savings institutions continued to generate solid earnings on their mortgage banking activity during the second quarter of 2013, according to a new call report analysis by Inside Mortgage Trends. Banks and thrifts reported $8.164 billion in mortgage banking income during the second quarter, a 6.0 percent increase from the first three months of the year. It was, in fact, the second best quarterly earnings for the industry since the bank call report was amended in ... [Includes two data charts]

Tommy Adkins, director of loan production for Florida Capital Bank Mortgage, has some advice for lenders fearing a tumultuous slowdown in refinancings: cut overhead now and don’t look back. Unfortunately for rank-and-file mortgage workers, cutting overhead means jobs. When Wells Fargo recently announced that it was eliminating 2,300 jobs in its mortgage department, it provided few details on what type of workers were let go except to say most were in fulfillment and processing. A Wells spokesman ...

Federal regulators this week re-proposed risk-retention requirements with an option to align the definition of qualified residential mortgages with the definition of qualified mortgages. The regulators said the alignment will help increase mortgage availability and reduce compliance costs. “The agencies are concerned about the prospect of imposing further constraints on mortgage credit availability at this time, especially as such constraints might disproportionately affect groups that have ...

The spike in interest rates in recent months didn’t cause a significant change in homebuyer behavior, according to the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey. The non-cash share of purchase-financing continued to increase in July and sales-to-list price ratios remained elevated, indicating strong demand from homebuyers relying on mortgage financing. Non-cash financing (conventional mortgages, FHA and VA, non-agency, etc.) accounted for 72.1 percent of ...

Trying to sell a residential finance company in a rising rate environment is never an easy thing, much less a mortgage technology company that is known for having a large client base of third-party lenders including loan brokers. But don’t tell that to Ellie Mae. Earlier this month the publicly traded mortgage software vendor saw its share price spike 25 percent after word leaked out that it was contemplating a sale. Although company co-founder and Chief Executive Sigmund Anderman declined to ...

Altisource Portfolio Solutions this month announced that a subsidiary will acquire Equator, the software service provider that helps facilitate home sales for four of the six largest servicers as well as the government-sponsored enterprises. The acquisition is valued at a base price of $70 million with an additional $80 million over three years, subject to Equator achieving performance targets. The sale is set to close by mid-September. Altisource said the acquisition diversifies its customer base and ...

No one in the mortgage industry expects that subprime lending will revive much unless it’s the subprime of yesteryear where equity was a key factor in determining whether a borrower should get a loan. The handful of subprime (“hard money,” call it what you will) lenders active today require hefty down payments in the range of 30 percent. The most successful subprime lender in terms of money raised is Citadel Loan Servicing of Irvine, CA, the brainchild of Dan Perl, which raised ... [Includes three briefs]

Mortgage income reported in bank call reports includes earnings from production, loan sales and net servicing results, so industry profits are not tied exclusively to new lending.