Although Impac Mortgage Holdings lost $142.8 million over the past two quarters, company management continues to be bullish on its future, laying the groundwork for a further expansion into the non-qualified loan market.

PrimeLending is churning through loan originators, recruiting strong candidates and letting go of “non-performers” as lenders battle for purchase mortgages. In recent months, the retail lender owned by PlainsCapital Bank hired about 250 LOs and released about 200 others, according to Alan White, chairman of PlainsCapital Bank and co-CEO and vice chairman of Hilltop Holdings, which owns the bank. “We’ve been able to upgrade our staff,” he said during Hilltop’s earnings call ...

First Horizon National Corp. is seeing strong profits from its warehouse lending efforts. Loans to mortgage companies are the bank holding company’s most profitable lending business, according to officials at First Horizon. Warehouse lending is completed through the company’s banking subsidiary, First Tennessee. As of the end of the second quarter, First Tennessee had $3.0 billion in warehouse lending commitments, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. BJ Losch, an executive ...

The profit picture varied widely among the shrinking number of publicly-traded nonbank mortgage lenders during the third quarter. A new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis reveals that seven companies generated a total of $235.45 million from their mortgage banking businesses during the third quarter. That was up 14.8 percent from the previous period largely because New Residential Mortgage increased its profits and Impac cut its losses. An eighth nonbank ... [Includes one data chart]

The Federal Home Loan Bank System’s combined net income dropped 3.0 percent in the third quarter of 2018 but year-to-date profits were still a comfortable 10.4 percent above the same period last year. Advances were down 1.9 percent year-over-year, having dropped 3.9 percent for the quarter. The FHLBank Office of Finance reported that third-quarter net income was $942 million, down slightly from $971 million in the second quarter. But cumulative ... [Includes one data chart]

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reported $6.72 billion in net income during the third quarter, down 3.5 percent from the previous quarter. The government-sponsored enterprises have also been actively whittling down their retained portfolios.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac generated a combined net income of $6.72 billion during the third quarter of 2018, down slightly from the $6.96 billion they generated in the previous period.

A test of the jumbo mortgage-backed security market by Wells Fargo went well enough that the bank plans to regularly issue deals after avoiding the market for years. “Based on the positive response from investors to Wells Fargo’s recent private residential MBS transaction and given acceptable market conditions, we expect to do periodic offerings of private residential MBS going forward,” said Tom Goyda, a spokesman for the bank. The $441.3 million issuance from Wells that closed ...

Wholesale-broker production of FHA loans was up 8.1 percent from the second to the third quarter of 2018, making it the fastest-growing channel in the program, according to a new Inside FHA/VA Lending analysis of Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities data. However, the volume of brokered VA loans securitized during the third quarter fell 4.0 percent from the previous period, the only channel to show a loss over that period. Correspondent production remained king in the FHA segment, with volume rising 7.4 percent from the second quarter. Correspondents generated 48.9 percent of FHA loans delivered into Ginnie MBS pools over the first nine months of the year. PennyMac Financial and Amerihome Mortgage duked it out as the top correspondent platforms in the third-quarter FHA market. Retail was runner-up with a 35.6 percent share of FHA year-to-date business, with wholesale-broker accounting for just ... [Charts]

Ginnie Mae officials would welcome a return of commercial banks to the program, but they are not planning on it. Instead, the agency is looking the other way: at expanding financing options for nonbank portfolios of mortgage servicing rights. The current version of Ginnie’s acknowledgement agreement has been successful, enabling nonbank servicers to arrange MSR financing for virtually their entire portfolios, said Michael Drayne, a senior vice president at Ginnie, during the Residential Mortgage Finance Symposium sponsored by the Structured Finance Industry Group this week in New York. Although a number of banks are financing nonbank servicing portfolios, many are still not participating, he said. Karen Gelernt, a partner at Alston & Bird, noted that many banks continue to have anxiety about what will happen if a servicer defaults on its Ginnie requirements. Speaking as moderator on a panel with ...