Mortgage banking profitability declined in the third quarter despite an uptick in net income on servicing, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s latest performance report. Average firm pretax income declined by 9.6 percent, from $1.58 million in the second quarter to $1.43 million in the third, the MBA reported. The group’s quarterly report includes lenders of all types and sizes but has a significant number of smaller independent mortgage companies. Some 82.9 percent of lenders turned a profit ...

Executives at mortgage lending operations and other financial services providers are increasingly relying on the latest technology to get a better handle on consumer complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, according to a recent survey by Aptean, an enterprise application software vendor based in Atlanta. “To minimize both costs and consumer friction, savvy financial institutions are leveraging technology to identify and manage the root cause of consumer complaints ...

Mortgage production likely will be flat in 2015, a prognosis that usually doesn’t warm the hearts of vendors that make their living off of originators. But don’t tell that to Ellie Mae, the publicly traded mortgage software provider whose Encompass platform has been growing steadily in recent years. In an interview with Inside Mortgage Trends, company President and Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Corr predicted that Ellie Mae’s revenues will grow by 25 percent next year, the same growth rate as ...

Commercial banks and thrifts reported slightly higher valuations on their mortgage servicing rights during the third quarter of 2014, but they continued to shed MSR, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data. Banks serviced a total of $4.412 trillion of home mortgages for other investors, typically loans that have been pooled in mortgage-backed securities. That was down 1.0 percent from the second quarter and off 7.5 percent from the third quarter of 2013 ...

Private mortgage insurers ended the third quarter of 2014 on a strong note, increasing their combined volume of net premiums written to $1.05 billion, up 9.8 percent from the prior quarter and 2.8 percent over the first nine months compared to the same period a year ago, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of industry data. Based on the upward production trend over the last three quarters, it appears the private MIs are on their way to a strong close at year end ...

Downpayment requirements play a larger role than interest rates in whether a potential borrower can afford a mortgage, according to new research from staff at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Potential borrowers who are less wealthy are particularly sensitive to downpayment requirements. Andreas Fuster and Basit Zafar, senior economists at the NY Fed, designed a survey in which respondents are asked for their maximum willingness to pay for a home comparable to their current home ...

The key factor is that some mortgage originators, the megabanks especially, are keeping conventional loans in portfolio that might otherwise be securitized by Fannie and Freddie.

A proposed FHA administrative fee as high as 4 basis points to fund quality assurance enforcement and technology upgrades also went down in flames.

The Conference of State Bank Supervisors is working on capital requirements for nonbank servicers, a story first reported by Inside Mortgage Finance last month.

Compared to two years ago, staffing levels at the CFPB have increased a whopping 55 percent. Of course, Congress has no say over the agency’s budget.