When dealing with celebrity clients – TV and film stars in particular – mortgage loan officers rarely interact directly with the star talent over the loan details. Instead, they deal with a celebrity’s business manager or another intermediary, according to Barry Habib, CEO at MBS Highway and a well-known mortgage trainer and motivational speaker. Habib should know – besides being a mortgage professional, he’s also an actor and producer, whose credits include ...

Trading in non-agency MBS, by comparison, is almost non-existent with June's volume coming in at just $2.9 billion.

Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a modified bill that would require federal banking regulators to study the role of depository institutions in the MSR market.

CFPB chief Richard Cordray promised: "If we see errors, we’ll point out what they are and how they should be corrected. We will not be looking to be punitive toward people.”

Despite shrinking housing receivables, Citigroup marked up the asset value of its MSR contracts to $1.924 billion, a 14 percent improvement from the end of the first quarter.

Selene CEO and industry veteran Larry Litton is retiring. Years ago Litton launched Litton Loan Servicing, which he eventually sold to Goldman Sachs.

Depository institutions – along with the top tier of companies that service loans pooled in mortgage-backed securities by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae – continued to pull back from the market during the second quarter of 2015, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis. Commercial banks, thrifts and credit unions serviced a total of $3.218 trillion of mortgage servicing rights connected with agency MBS as of the end of the second quarter. That was down 6.9 percent from the first quarter of 2015. Although depositories remain the dominant force in the agency MSR market, accounting for 64.2 percent of servicing on outstanding single-family MBS, nonbanks continued...[Includes four data tables]

For mortgage companies that were hoping to go public this year, they might as well forget about it. As one industry analyst put it: “The IPO market isn’t even on life support. It’s just plain dead.” Although many privately held mortgage firms are enjoying a strong year in both lending and profitability, the initial public offering market is dormant for three reasons: Nationstar Mortgage, Ocwen Financial and Walter Investment Management Corp. This year, the once “big three” nonbanks have paid...

The mortgage division is housed in BofA’s consumer banking division, which employed 65,818 workers at the end of June.

Some residential lenders are still living off of refi applications that were filed earlier in the year...