Real estate investment trust New Residential Investment Corp. has been quietly trolling for mortgage servicing assets the past year and snagged a big one this week when it agreed to buy $97 billion in agency rights from Citigroup. Now comes the hard part: incorporating the receivables into an already fast-growing portfolio and convincing regulators at the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Ginnie Mae officials that it has both the management structure and the financial wherewithal to handle so much product. According to a tally from Inside Mortgage Finance, since early December New Residential has acquired...

A day after Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee delayed a vote on some of President Trump’s nominations by refusing to attend a confirmation hearing, Republicans used a parliamentary maneuver to push through a unanimous favorable vote on two of them. Mortgage industry observers were expecting positive votes this week from the committee on the nominations of Steve Mnuchin as the new head of the U.S. Treasury and Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-AL, as the next U.S. Attorney General. However, Democrat members of the committee refused...

The Independent Community Bankers of America is urging the Trump administration to push for the elimination of disparate impact from federal fair lending laws to curb “fair lending overreach” and unwarranted enforcement actions against community banks. The ICBA is seeking an amendment to federal fair lending laws to bar certain disparate-impact causes of action. The amendment would clarify that disparate impact without a finding of an intent to discriminate is not a fair lending violation. “This would ensure that community banks that uniformly apply sound and neutral lending standards are not subjected to unnecessary regulatory enforcement actions or frivolous and abusive lawsuits,” said Lilly Thomas, ICBA senior vice president and senior regulatory counsel. Thomas said...

Further, the lawmakers’ motion is untimely and fails to meet the standard for intervention, the lender argues in its filing.

The CFPB also took action against two realty firms: ReMax Gold Coast and Keller Williams Mid-Willamette...

Fairholme: “Only the disingenuous would assert that recapitalization of these companies would take decades and come at taxpayers’ expense…”

Keefe, Bruyette & Woods is worried about the prepayment risk that comes with owning so much Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac servicing rights…

The company’s motion arises in an unusual procedural context…

The trade group’s blueprint also throws cold water on any piecemeal “recap and release” plan for Fannie and Freddie.

Late last week, PHH Corp. followed up on the opportunity afforded it by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and filed its legal response to the arguments the Department of Justice made late last year in defense of the CFPB’s petition for an en banc rehearing in its dispute with the mortgage lender.The DOJ’s brief “asserts support for rehearing en banc, but not for any of the reasons advanced by the CFPB,” PHH said. “Indeed, the brief never actually defends the CFPB’s structure as consistent with the Constitution. Nor does the brief claim anywhere that the panel erred in its choice of remedy, its decision to reach the separation-of-powers issue, or its discussion of ...