The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of the Inspector General has announced a second round of mortgage note sales for this year under the expanded Distressed Asset Stabilization Program. Separate sales of approximately 20,000 severely delinquent loans have been scheduled for June 26 and July 10 as part of HUD’s effort to reduce its bulging inventory of foreclosed residential properties and to target relief to areas hit the hardest by foreclosures. HUD estimates the total unpaid balance of the loans in this sale at ...

Although loan broker employment continues to rise, the market share for table funding declined in the first quarter, according to exclusive survey figures from Inside Mortgage Finance.

Are investors making a big mistake by speculating in Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac common and preferred?

Loan brokerage firms are continuing to hire, even though their market share declined slightly in the first quarter.

Essent, the number-five player in mortgage insurance, has received ratings from both S&P and Moody's.

Fannie Mae and Bank of America resolved a huge portion of the whopping $19.04 billion in disputed buyback requests facing the mortgage industry at the beginning of 2013, but both government-sponsored enterprises will remain aggressive in hunting for repurchase opportunities. In fact, new repurchase requests increased by a whopping 87.8 percent in the first three months of this year compared to the fourth quarter of 2012, reaching a record $12.14 billion, according to an analysis of GSE quarterly reports by Inside Mortgage Finance. The biggest increase was at Fannie Mae, where new buyback requests soared to $9.91 billion, while Freddie Mac reported a more modest 5.2 percent increase. The jump in new buyback demands occurred...[Includes one data chart]

More Fannie Mae mortgage business is ending up in multi-issuer pools as more lenders turn to direct sales to the government-sponsored enterprise, and experts say the company has been able to turn the trend to its advantage in the securities market. According to a new loan-level analysis of single-family mortgage-backed securities by Inside Mortgage Finance, some 39.1 percent of Fannie’s MBS production in the first quarter of 2013 was in multi-issuer pools. That compared to 30.0 percent, by dollar volume, of the GSE’s MBS issuance back in the first quarter of last year. Single-seller pools, generated mostly by the giants of the mortgage lending industry, continue...

Over the past few weeks, speculators have been driving up the price of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac common stock and “trust” preferred shares in the hope of a payoff somewhere down the line. But according to interviews conducted by Inside Mortgage Finance, the only payoff might come if they can find someone else willing to pay more than they did for stock that is considered virtually worthless. Industry lobbyists, former government-sponsored enterprise executives and some investors say...

Why is the share price of Fannie Mae's junior preferred stock rising so much? Also, send Freddie Mac "back to the future"?

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are continuing to shrink their retained portfolios as mandated by their regulator.