As one mortgage CEO noted: “We’d be knocking it out of the park already if there were more [home] sellers."

Mortgage brokers accounted for 12.9 percent of agency production.

However, this group of nonbank lender/servicers is hardly homogenous…

BAML suggested that one of the reasons prepayment speeds on jumbos have been relatively slow is the presence of self-employed borrowers…

The CFPB has fined Nationstar Mortgage $1.75 million for allegedly violating the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act by “consistently failing to report accurate data about mortgage transactions for 2012 through 2014,” the agency said. The CFPB said it found that Nationstar’s HMDA compliance systems were flawed and generated mortgage lending data with significant, preventable errors. “Nationstar also failed to maintain detailed HMDA data collection and validation procedures, and failed to implement adequate compliance procedures,” the bureau alleged. “It also produced discrepancies by failing to consistently define data among its various lines of business.” Further, data samples reviewed by the CFPB showed substantial error rates in three consecutive reporting years, the bureau said. “In the samples reviewed, the CFPB found error rates ...

Late last week, the CFPB proposed amendments to Regulation B, the implementing regulation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, to give mortgage lenders greater flexibility in collecting information about consumer ethnicity and race. Reg B restricts lenders’ ability to ask consumers about their race, color, religion, national origin or gender, except in certain circumstances. These circumstances include required collection of the information for some mortgage applications under the regulation. Under the proposal, mortgage lenders would not have to maintain different practices depending on their loan volume or other characteristics, allowing more lenders to adopt application forms that include expanded requests for information about a consumer’s ethnicity and race, including the revised uniform residential loan application issued by government-sponsored enterprises Fannie ...

During the fourth quarter of 2016, lenders repurchased just $207.31 million of home loans, a 37.0 percent decline from the third quarter.

Issues involving regulatory compliance have declined significantly under the Trump administration.

Mortgage lenders that sell loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saw a huge drop in the volume of repurchases and other indemnifications in 2016, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis of disclosure reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During the fourth quarter of 2016, lenders repurchased just $207.31 million of home loans, a 37.0 percent decline from the third quarter. That brought total repurchases to $1.101 billion last year, down 35.9 percent from 2015. Those are record lows in the contentious recent history of GSE buyback demands. Fannie and Freddie, along with other “asset securitizers,” began filing quarterly repurchase reports with the SEC in early...

Vice President Mike Pence’s chief economist said the Trump administration is working on GSE reform principles. The comments came this week during a government relations summit hosted by the American Bankers Association. Mark Calabria, former director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, caused a media frenzy when during a general session he said that a “set of principles” on GSE reform is likely to emerge in the coming months. Calabria is not a proponent of the GSEs, and believes that without Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, commercial banks would step in to fill the liquidity void for the simple reason they have so much in the way of “excess reserves.”