All three agencies posted big increases in multifamily MBS issuance last year, with Freddie (up 65.4 percent) and Fannie (up 36.4 percent) leading the way…
Federal courts and a state attorney general have been busy this past week churning out decisions and announcing settlements on a number of cases involving legacy non-agency MBS, Wall Street financial institutions and pension funds. A hearing on a proposed $272 million cash settlement of two class-action lawsuits against Goldman Sachs involving legacy MBS will be held on April 13, 2016, at 10 a.m. in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Attorneys for the plaintiffs, NECA-IBEW Health & Welfare Fund and the Police and Fire Retirement System of the City of Detroit, sent out...
Redwood Trust, which pioneered the revival of the jumbo MBS market a few years back, this month officially exited the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac correspondent-purchase business, dismantling the effort and trimming the size of its Denver office. The real estate investment trust had entered the government-sponsored enterprise market two years ago, after obtaining agency approvals at the end of 2013. It quickly built a network of several dozen lenders that sold whole loans to Redwood, which pooled them in GSE MBS. But sources familiar with the effort told...
Investors in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac stock haven’t had a lot of success challenging the federal government’s quarterly earnings sweep at the two government-sponsored enterprises, but they’re looking for better results in the two states where the GSEs are chartered. The plaintiffs, David Jacobs and Gary Hindes on behalf of themselves and other shareholders, said state law prohibits the preferred stock of a corporation from getting a cumulative dividend right equal to all the net worth of the corporation. Their lawsuit is pending in the state supreme courts of Delaware, where Fannie is chartered, and Virginia, Freddie’s corporate domicile. The filing pointed...
Fitch Ratings will allow for differences in third-party due diligence practices when rating various types of residential MBS, granting concessions to risk-sharing transactions from the government-sponsored enterprises. The firm released revised master-rating criteria late last week. Among the changes compared with criteria that were released in October was an allowance for differences among non-agency MBS backed by recent originations, transactions related to the GSEs and non-agency MBS backed by seasoned loans. While most jumbo MBS issued in recent years have included third-party due diligence reviews of 100 percent of the loans in a deal, the GSEs’ much larger risk-sharing transactions have been...
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac plan to ramp up their bulk sales of nonperforming loans in 2016 with the two government-sponsored enterprises ushering in the year by going to market with nearly $3 billion in NPL offerings in January. Freddie’s first NPL auction of the year was its largest so far, totaling $1.6 billion in unpaid principal balance and marketed in seven pools. The NPLs are serviced...
The plaintiffs argue that state law prohibits the preferred stock of a corporation from getting a cumulative dividend right equal to all of a company's net worth...
The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s recent final rule limiting membership in the Federal Home Loan Bank system will reduce funding for originations of non-qualified mortgages and other non-agency activity, according to industry analysts. In recent years, many real estate investment trusts gained access to FHLBank advances via captive insurance companies. A final rule from the FHFA this month closed that so-called loophole, with the regulator claiming that Congress didn’t ...
Redwood Trust announced last week that it will discontinue acquiring and aggregating conforming mortgages for resale to the government-sponsored enterprises. Officials at the real estate investment trust stressed that Redwood’s jumbo operations will continue. Redwood started selling conforming mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2014, acquiring $4.0 billion in conforming loans during the year along with $5.0 billion in jumbos. Through three quarters in 2015, Redwood had ...
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