President Obama this week released his agenda for creating economic opportunity for millennials, including greater access to mortgage credit through FHA. While the economy has recovered and there has been some improvement in the housing market, millennials are on a much slower pace toward homeownership than previous generations, the president said. Many are in rental housing, ready to become homeowners but are locked out by the tough, restrictive lending environment, he added. Millennials – identified as those born between 1982 and 2004, also known as Generation Y – are finding it harder to purchase homes because of lender overlays, high mortgage insurance premiums and high downpayment requirements. It also has been difficult for anyone with a credit score below 680 to obtain a purchase-mortgage loan. In his agenda, Obama expressed concern over the ...

Ginnie Mae issuance for the first nine months of 2014 totaled $207.5 billion as government-backed purchase-mortgage activity picked up in the third quarter, according to an analysis of agency data. New issuances rose 19.8 percent from the second quarter. FHA loans accounted for $116.9 billion of new Ginnie Mae issuances while VA and the Rural Housing Development funneled $75.9 billion and $14.2 billion, respectively, of new loans into Ginnie Mae pools. Mortgage securities backed by home-equity conversion mortgages are not included. Purchase mortgages totaling $140.6 billion comprised the bulk of new issuances over the nine-month period while the share of refinances totaled $49.8 billion. Modified loans accounted for $17.1 billion. Most of the FHA and VA loans originated during the first nine months came through the ... [ 2 charts ]

FHA to Extend Short Refi Program. The FHA has announced its intent to extend its Short Refinance Program for borrowers in negative equity positions. A mortgagee letter will be issued soon to announce the extension. Feedback Period extended for Draft Servicing Section of Proposed Single Family Handbook. The FHA is extending the comment period for the draft servicing section of the Single Family Housing Policy Handbook through Nov. 14, 2014 to allow stakeholders additional time to study and comment on the proposed section. The original deadline date was Oct. 17. CFPB Updates Reverse Mortgage Guide. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recently updated its reverse mortgage guide on its website to account for recent changes made by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to its Home Equity Conversion Mortgage program. The updated guide highlights new limits to ...

Between now and yearend, it should be a seller’s market for mortgage servicing rights, as long as the seller isn’t trying to unload legacy or “high-touch” product. Legacy deals – at least large ones – continue to be a non-entity in the market as buyers are focusing on smaller MSR packages tied to relatively new originations. One recent legacy deal that was scuttled entailed the sale of roughly $800 million in Ginnie Mae MSRs by Ocwen Financial. Industry advisors familiar with the situation aren’t sure why ...

The labor participation rate in the United States continues to lag, especially for the youngest potential homebuyers. If it continues to drift downward, as a recent paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland suggests, that could push the homeownership rate down to 62.5 percent, and result in an additional 20 percent to 25 percent decline in purchase-mortgage production, according to a recent review by analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. “The conclusion we draw from the age breakouts of ...

Big banks have become much less reliant on principal-reduction loan modifications in the past year, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of data from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The shift does not appear to be due to improvements in loan performance because delinquency rates were essentially unchanged. Some 5.0 percent of the nearly 70,000 loan modifications completed in the second quarter of 2014 by eight servicers tracked by the OCC included principal reduction ...

The mortgage industry is trying to make its way against demographic, economic and regulatory crosscurrents, with its future pretty much hanging in the balance, according to Mortgage Bankers Association Chairman-Elect Bill Cosgrove. Speaking to attendees of the MBA’s regulatory compliance conference in Washington, DC, early this week, Cosgrove raised some demographic issues that are troubling. “Today’s consumer is evolving in rapid fashion. The age of the first-time homebuyer ...

The performance of home-equity loans held by banks and thrifts remains strong but concerns have been raised about home-equity lines of credit originated before the financial crisis. Banks and thrifts reported $998.63 billion in total home-equity business at the end of the second quarter of 2014, including retained HELOCs and closed-end seconds, and unused HELOC commitments, according to the Inside Mortgage Finance Bank Mortgage Database. Total HEL business declined ... [Includes one data chart]

Ginnie Mae has unveiled new plans for issuer standards as well as steps to boost liquidity in the mortgage servicing rights (MSR) market. Agency officials at a summit hosted by Ginnie Mae this week in Washington, DC, said both actions are designed to avoid issuer failures and to preserve residential mortgage servicing as an economically viable activity and MSRs as an attractive asset class. The officials said changes will be made to Ginnie’s mortgage-backed securities program to support the agency’s transformation from a pre-crisis bank-driven government MBS program to a post-crisis program where non-depositories and smaller financial institutions play a much bigger role. By the middle of next year, approximately a third of Ginnie MSRs will have changed hands over the previous four years, agency officials said. Many of the new owners of the servicing rights are ...

Approved issuers must ensure that loans have the requisite federal insurance or guarantee before bundling them for securitization, cautioned Ginnie Mae. Loans that fail Ginnie’s “loan matching” review will be tagged as “uninsured” and will not be accepted for securitization, according to John Kozak, a Ginnie Mae account executive and a panelist at a conference sponsored by the agency this week. Ginnie Mae uses loan matching to screen for mortgages that may have been endorsed on paper but have not been actually insured or guaranteed by either the FHA, VA or the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Development. Every month, Ginnie Mae takes a certain lender’s entire mortgage portfolio and throws it up against the agency’s insured/guaranteed database in search for loan mismatches. To do this, the agency uses “two-string match” criteria, which consist of a ...