The Federal Housing Finance Authority announced on May 7 that it is easing loan limits on certain types of multifamily mortgages to exclude them from imposed $30 billion financing caps set on the GSEs earlier in the year. While the $30 billion cap on new multifamily lending won’t change, the FHFA is revising the excluded category to “facilitate continued liquidity in the multifamily finance market which has increased substantially since the initial cap was set.” With continuing growth in the multifamily market, analysts said there is a growing concern that the GSEs may hit the cap by the third quarter. Industry insiders also said that one of the goals is to ease the concern of both a possible tightening....

REITs Continue to Join FHLBs. American Capital is the latest captive insurer mortgage real estate investment trust to join a FHLB. It announced in April that it joined the FHLB of Des Moines. A spokesman for the FHFA said that there has been no movement as of yet on the proposed ban to prevent REITS from gaining membership. Freddie Mac Announced Standard Pool Offering. Last week Freddie announced an upcoming auction of a $233 million standard pool offering of delinquent loans. The loans are offered as a single pool of geographically diverse deeply delinquent non-performing loans that are currently being serviced by Ocwen. Bids....

It’s not clear whether thousands of other – much smaller – mortgage servicers grew enough to offset the decline in the top tier.

Like Freddie Mac, Fannie cautioned that future earnings will be lower because of the company’s mandate to shrink.

The legislation would provide a temporary transitional license and give loan originators 120 days to pass testing standards...

Most firms report the earnings/loss figure in the first or second paragraph of their press release, but not Stonegate Mortgage.

Freddie Mac will send $746 million to the U.S. Treasury under the conservatorship plan that siphons off nearly all the government-sponsored enterprise’s net profit every quarter, but that’s not all the cash being milked from the GSE. During the first quarter of 2015, Freddie sent $219 million to Treasury under the 2011 law that squeezed the GSEs to pay for a continuation of a payroll tax cut for U.S. workers. The levy is 10 basis points of guaranty fee charged by Freddie and Fannie Mae, and it’s a steadily rising amount as a greater share of GSE business is subject to the charge. In the first quarter of last year, Freddie paid...

Now that brokers are gaining traction, the big question becomes: how much more market share can they gobble up?

Fun fact: First Republic was the only bank among the top five contributors to jumbo MBS issued in the first quarter.

Nearly every firm tracked in the Inside Mortgage Finance Large Servicer Delinquency Index reported improvements in mortgage performance during the first quarter...