Stratmor Senior Partner Garth Graham recently offered a handful of things mortgage lenders should consider to make the best decisions possible about their investments in digital technology. First, lender executives should be sure they clearly know the business case for the investments they are making. “Without a very specific business case, it is very difficult to generate the additional revenue or lower the expense necessary to handle the investments that are being made in new technology ...

Purchase-mortgage originations are expected to increase slightly in 2018, but not enough to offset declines in refinance activity, according to industry analysts. On average, economists at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Mortgage Bankers Association project that $1.21 trillion in purchase mortgages will be originated next year, up 5.9 percent from the amount expected in 2017. “All the pieces are in place for stronger growth in 2018 and beyond,” Michael Fratantoni, the MBA’s chief economist ...

Property value estimates from traditional appraisals may have a significant amount of uncertainty behind them, but Collateral Analytics says it may have a solution that could improve the accuracy of appraisals. Loan purchasers and portfolio lenders can benefit from CA’s new tool, which can be used for strategic lending and better risk management, according to Michael Sklarz, founder and president of Collateral Analytics. “We are taking an appraisal and its accompanying information ...

Nearly half of the loans securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae during the third quarter came from lenders’ retail platforms, a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis shows. Correspondents generated 38.8 percent of the market and posted the highest purchase-mortgage concentration, 77.8 percent. Mortgage brokers were involved in 11.6 percent of agency business, with a relatively high 35.9 percent refinance distribution ... [Includes one data chart]

The only top-five servicer to report an increase in volume was Nationstar Mortgage...

The loss would have been worse if not for a one-time tax benefit of $23.2 million…

Nationstar originated $4.25 billion of new home mortgages in 3Q17…

According to bidders in the market, the early action focuses on loans that are “stuck” on warehouse lines.

There were no seismic shifts in the demographics of the mortgage-servicing business during the third quarter of 2017, although a new Inside Mortgage Finance ranking and analysis revealed an unexpected decline in the total holdings of the top servicers and a shift in composition. The top five shops held a whopping $3.716 trillion of servicing on their books at the end of September, down 0.2 percent from the previous quarter. The only top-five servicer to ... [Includes two data charts]

In an attempt to help its smaller seller/servicers achieve better pricing on coissuance transactions, Fannie Mae will launch a new “Servicing Marketplace” designed as an upgrade to an existing program that some say was seldom used. The new platform allows sellers to choose a Fannie-approved coissuance servicer and commit to sell servicing rights at the same time they sell the loan into a Fannie mortgage-backed security. All transactions are on a bifurcated basis; that is, the seller is still ...