The vast majority of community banks plan to continue to offer mortgages even though increased regulation is limiting business, according to a survey conducted by the Conference of State Bank Supervisors. Rules from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau remain a primary concern, although many community banks already offer loans outside of the standards for qualified mortgages. “Banks continue to see opportunity in residential mortgage lending but have a mixed view of non-QM lending,” according to the report jointly compiled with the Federal Reserve. “Assessing the ability to repay and QM standards against current exposures, bankers generally identified a low level of nonconformance, suggesting the rules may generally be in line with bank practices while still requiring significant changes in operations.” Some 64 percent of the 884 community banks surveyed said...

So, is now a good time to buy into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? It's a game not for the faint of heart.

Quicken Loans once again ranked first among all FHA lenders, out producing Wells Fargo by more than $170 million. No, that's not a misprint.

The handbook is designed to support FHA’s broader goals of expanding access to mortgage credit and making it easier for stakeholders to do business with the agency.

Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie All saw most of their business come from borrowers earning less than $150,000 per year.

The Ginnie II program now accounts for up about 98 percent of new agency issuance.

At the top of the heap was the Federal Reserve, which boosted its agency MBS portfolio by 3.8 percent during the second quarter.

In its rebuttal, FHA argues that if the delinquent loans had not been worked out, lenders would have been entitled to $5.2 billion of insurance claims – money the MMIF could ill afford.

Ginnie Mae has unveiled new plans for issuer standards as well as steps to boost liquidity in the mortgage servicing rights (MSR) market. Agency officials at a summit hosted by Ginnie Mae this week in Washington, DC, said both actions are designed to avoid issuer failures and to preserve residential mortgage servicing as an economically viable activity and MSRs as an attractive asset class. The officials said changes will be made to Ginnie’s mortgage-backed securities program to support the agency’s transformation from a pre-crisis bank-driven government MBS program to a post-crisis program where non-depositories and smaller financial institutions play a much bigger role. By the middle of next year, approximately a third of Ginnie MSRs will have changed hands over the previous four years, agency officials said. Many of the new owners of the servicing rights are ...

Approved issuers must ensure that loans have the requisite federal insurance or guarantee before bundling them for securitization, cautioned Ginnie Mae. Loans that fail Ginnie’s “loan matching” review will be tagged as “uninsured” and will not be accepted for securitization, according to John Kozak, a Ginnie Mae account executive and a panelist at a conference sponsored by the agency this week. Ginnie Mae uses loan matching to screen for mortgages that may have been endorsed on paper but have not been actually insured or guaranteed by either the FHA, VA or the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Development. Every month, Ginnie Mae takes a certain lender’s entire mortgage portfolio and throws it up against the agency’s insured/guaranteed database in search for loan mismatches. To do this, the agency uses “two-string match” criteria, which consist of a ...