Partly to comply with liquidity cover ratio requirements imposed in the wake of the financial crisis, U.S. banks ramped up their holdings of high-quality liquid assets. But once they got compliant, many of them shifted their asset allocations more to agency MBS and U.S. Treasuries, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve. This could have implications for the U.S. central bank’s massive balance sheet over the long haul, they added. As of Jan. 1, 2015, large banks in the U.S. have needed...

A handful of large banks continued to retreat from the business of servicing home loans for other investors during the second quarter of 2017, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call reports. Commercial banks and savings institutions reported that they serviced $3.627 trillion of residential mortgages for other investors, typically mortgage-backed securities trusts, as of the end of June. That was down just 0.4 percent from the previous period ... [Includes one data chart]

Mortgage-banking profits improved dramatically during the second quarter as production volume surged and servicing held its own, according to data reported by the Mortgage Bankers Association. Participants in the group’s quarterly mortgage-banking performance study reported average pretax income of $2.12 million for the second quarter. That was up handsomely from the average $886,000 companies earned in the first three months of the year. Profits weren’t as strong as they were ...

Interest rates offered for mortgages generally track with pricing for the loans in the secondary market. However, new research published by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that lenders offer worse pricing to borrowers when demand for loans is relatively strong. The findings were detailed in a working paper authored by Andreas Fuster, Stephanie Lo and Paul Willen. Fuster and Willen are in research departments at Fed banks, while Lo is currently a ...

Over the past few weeks, two $100 million-plus transactions involving mortgage technology companies have been announced, signaling that more activity may be ahead in the space as residential finance moves toward the digital age. “This is an interesting time,” said consultant Jeff Lebowitz, a former Fannie Mae executive who has been tracking tech changes for two-plus decades. “There’s a paradigm shift going on. Outside guys are coming in, thinking there’s big changes ahead for ...

Independent mortgage bankers are leading all other lenders in providing mortgage loans to first-time homebuyers, minorities, lower-income borrowers and rural areas, and yet they are more regulated than banks, according to a new industry report. The report from the Community Home Lenders Association underscores the fact that IMBs are small businesses that don’t have access to federally insured deposits. It claims that IMBs have done a better job of servicing home loans ...

Publicly traded companies generally reported improved earnings on the production side of their mortgage banking activities during the second quarter of 2017 but slumping income from servicing. A group of 12 lenders that includes most of the top players in the industry reported a combined $1.16 billion in production-related income during the second quarter, up 6.9 percent from the first three months of the year. Combined origination volume was up ... [Includes one data chart]

Warehouse providers of credit ended the second quarter of 2017 with $64.0 billion of commitments on their books, a modest 8.5 percent sequential gain, reflecting a strong – but not an overheated – origination market for nonbank originators. Compared to the same quarter a year ago, commitments increased 12.3 percent. According to interviews conducted by Inside Mortgage Finance this week, credit managers are...[Includes one data table]

A proposal by federal regulators to delay tougher capital requirements for mortgage servicing assets will have a “marginally positive impact” on banks subject to the proposal, according to banking regulators. Near the end of August, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. issued a proposed rule that would extend the current treatment on mortgage servicing rights and related assets, delaying tougher standards established by Basel III. The proposal would apply to banks that aren’t subject to the “advanced approaches” capital rules – generally banks with less than $250 billion in total assets. “For small banking organizations that have significant amounts of MSAs ... the proposal could...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development this week announced changes to the FHA-insured reverse mortgage program, including a 200 basis point adjustment in the upfront mortgage insurance premium that may shut out some potential borrowers. HUD officials acknowledged during a press call that changes in both the upfront MIP and the HECM principal limit factors could reduce the number of borrowers initially by as much as 20 percent. Officials estimated that there are approximately 24 million seniors with untapped equity in their homes. “Overall, it is still a very large potential market,” said one official who spoke on background. “In the last few years, we did about 45,000 to 50,000 reverse mortgages annually. The net effect of all these changes is a better and safe HECM program for seniors. We’ll just have to wait and see how it plays out.” The revisions would help stabilize the ...