Appraisal bias remains a primary concern…

If Ocwen reenters the servicing market as a buyer it will be doing so at a time when MSR prices are the highest they’ve been all decade...

But there’s a catch: the portfolio has a delinquency rate of 11.5 percent and foreclosures of 1.5 percent.

However, some large commercial banks are willing to remain in the market through correspondent arrangements…

The trading peak for the year came in February at $239.2 billion.

Will FHA hike its premiums? Maybe, maybe not...

The Zeldin bill passed by a vote of 48-0.

Correspondent lenders and mortgage brokers continue to account for an unusually large share of FHA and VA lending, according to a new analysis by Inside FHA/VA Lending. During the first six months of 2018, correspondent-lending programs accounted for 53.3 percent of government-insured mortgage production, according to survey data reported by a broad cross-section of the market. At the same time, correspondent production accounted for 46.4 percent of conventional-conforming lending and a mere 16.1 percent of the non-agency jumbo market. The heavy reliance on agency securitization in both the conventional and government-insured sectors helps explain the higher levels of correspondent production. For many smaller shops, it is more economical to sell production to aggregators than pay the overhead costs of dealing directly with the agencies. In the government-insured sector, some banks are ... [Chart]

Ginnie Mae assured the mortgage industry that it would accept so-called VA orphan loans as long as they satisfy the terms of corrective legislation passed by the House Financial Services Committee recently. “As long as the mortgage loan complies with the law, we will accept it and put our guarantee on it,” said an agency spokesperson in response to an Inside FHA/VA Lending inquiry. Ginnie’s assurance provides certainty to a subset of VA loans that have been in limbo since June because they could not be delivered into Ginnie mortgage-backed securities. Lawmakers responded to industry calls for a legislative fix last week by voting overwhelmingly to approve H.R. 6737, the “Protect Affordable Mortgages for Veterans Act of 2018.” Introduced by Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-NY, the bill would eliminate the seasoning requirements in the recently enacted Dodd-Frank Act reform legislation, which conflicted with ...

Originations of government-insured mortgages rose 11.2 percent from the first to the second quarter of 2018, according to Inside Mortgage Finance estimates. That increase was slightly lower than the 17.1 percent gain in total first-lien originations over that period. The big winner for the second quarter was the jumbo sector, where loan volume surged 33.5 percent from the first three months of the year. On a year-to-date basis, government lending was down 12.6 percent from the first half of 2017. This reflects the steep decline in refinance lending in general, which affected FHA/VA production significantly. Jumbo lending was also down, by 6.6 percent, from the first six months of last year, but the conventional-conforming market saw a 4.2 percent gain at the midway point in 2018. FHA/VA loans accounted for 22.8 percent of first-lien originations in the first half of 2018. The government share for all of last year was ... [Chart]