Rising rates bolstered servicing values late in the year, but reduced production results…

UWM’s Mat Ishbia: “Through January and February, we did $5.1 billion with brokers and we expect these numbers to continue to grow…”

The fastest-growing program continued to be Ginnie Mae MBS, which shot up 8.2 percent for the year…

BRAWL has worked with the marketing teams at a number of wholesale lenders...

Approvals by state regulators and federal agencies of mortgage-related mergers and acquisitions can drag on for a variety of reasons, but lenders and servicers can help speed the process by providing detailed disclosures, according to industry attorneys. Keisha Whitehall Wolfe, counsel at the law firm of Mayer Brown, suggested providing regulators with details about what is changing at a company due to pending M&A activity and what isn’t changing. She suggested providing a ...

Mortgage rates fell this week for the first time in almost two months, but the respite may not be enough to save the industry from what could turn out to be a brutal round of belt-tightening and job cuts. Then again, it all depends on what type of lender you work for. According to interviews conducted by Inside Mortgage Trends over the past few weeks, many conventional lenders are being extremely cautious about their headcounts, while non-agency originators are feeling ...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both saw significant declines in the volume of defective loans that sellers had to repurchase from mortgage-backed securities pools last year, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. Mortgage sellers in 2017 repurchased – or made other indemnifications for defects – for just $973.5 million of single-family loans from Fannie and Freddie MBS. It was the lowest annual total since the two GSEs began filing quarterly repurchase disclosures with the Securities and Exchange Commission back in 2012. Buyback volume fell 11.6 percent from the 2016 total, including an 11.4 percent drop from the third to the fourth quarter of last year.

Projections for gradual increases to the homeownership rate might be overly optimistic, according to some industry analysts. The homeownership rate fell to the lowest level on record in 2016 and then rose in 2017 on an annual basis for the first time since 2004, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Some industry participants predict that the rate will likely continue to climb gradually, citing declines in renter households and other trends. However, an analysis by Laurie Goodman and ...

House-flip purchase financing totaled $16.1 billion in 2017, up 27 percent from $12.7 billion in 2016 – its highest dollar volume in a decade, according to ATTOM Data Solutions’ fourth quarter and yearend home-flipping report. The report showed 207,088 single-family houses and condominiums were flipped last year, a 1 percent increase year-over-year. It was the highest total of homes flipped since 2006. The flipped houses represented 5.9 percent of all single-family homes and ...

Credit reporting company Experian recently introduced a new product to provide lenders with a wider view into client behavior over time with records from all three national credit bureaus. The new product, Trended 3D, would synthesize a 24-month history of five key credit report fields – balance, credit limit or original loan amount, scheduled payment amount, actual payment amount, and last payment date – and provide a spectrum of user trends. Experian said a conventional credit report is ...