Ocwen Financial, the nation’s 12th largest servicer, has reached a civil settlement with the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General, to resolve a complaint filed by the state in 2017. As part of the agreement, Ocwen will make a $675,000 payment and provide relief to residential borrowers. The Massachusetts AG said the settlement involves total restitution of $2 million. The AG alleged that Ocwen committed “widespread mortgage servicing violations that increased Massachusetts ...

Ginnie Mae securitized $31.39 billion of FHA single-family purchase loans during the first quarter of 2019, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of agency mortgage-backed securities disclosures. Although that represented an 18.4% drop from the previous quarter, the FHA share of agency purchase loans edged up to 30.8% in early 2019 as other insurance programs saw larger declines. Private mortgage insurance remained ... [Includes one data chart.]

The fourth quarter of 2018 was one of the hardest times in recent memory for companies to generate a profit from their mortgage banking operations. The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that only 44.0% of participants in its quarterly performance survey managed to report positive pre-tax net income for the final three months of last year. This appears to be the lowest share of firms producing positive results in many years, lower than the 54.2% share back in the first quarter of 2014 ...

The wholesale-broker channel appears to be gaining ground in the tightly competitive primary market in agency conforming mortgages. A new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis reveals that broker originations accounted for 12.5% of single-family loans pooled in agency mortgage-backed securities during the first quarter of 2019. That represented a substantial leap of 1.3 percentage points from the broker share of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae ... [Includes two data charts.]

Mortgage repurchases by banks and thrifts fell to $2.29 billion in 2018, the lowest annual total since institutions began reporting this activity on quarterly call reports in 2007. It would have been a lot lower without Bank of America. [Includes one data chart]

Mortgage banking firms trimmed 1,100 posi-tions during January, ending the month with 239,900 full-timers on their payrolls, according to figures compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Loan brokers, on the other hand, added 500 positions, bringing employment in the sector to 86,300.

A lack of digital offerings has become a major drag on the home-equity market as customers are more likely turning to alternative sources of funding, according to a new study by J.D. Power.

After more than a year of pessimism among many lenders regarding profit margins, the outlook is improving, according to a survey by Fannie Mae.

Impac Mortgage Holdings is putting a strong emphasis on originating non-qualified mortgages as the product offers attractive margins. But the shift also has prompted large layoffs and employee turnover as non-QM volume hasn’t completely replaced production of conforming mortgages.

There was nowhere to hide in the fourth quarter of 2018 as mortgage banking income fell sharply both in loan production and servicing, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of earnings reports from publicly held companies. [Includes one data chart]