Issuance of non-mortgage ABS fell 31.7 percent from the second quarter of 2015 to the third quarter, with significant declines in most major sectors, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking and analysis. A total of $37.00 billion of ABS were issued in the third quarter, well off the pace set in the first half of the year. On a year-to-date basis, new ABS production was down 4.5 percent from the first nine months of 2014. That puts in jeopardy the string of four consecutive annual increases in ABS issuance since 2010 as the market enters the final lap of the year. Vehicle finance deals remained...[Includes two data tables]
While federal regulators issued a final rule setting risk-retention requirements for a variety of MBS and ABS in December 2014, uncertainty regarding implementation persists. Industry participants are seeking guidance from regulators on a variety of issues, including the application of risk retention to asset classes that weren’t prevalent when the Dodd-Frank Act was drafted. “It’s absolutely astonishing how much becomes unclear when you actually sit down to build a risk-retention solution,” Rick Jones, chair of finance and real estate groups at the Dechert law firm, said in a recent commentary. He noted...
The Federal Housing Finance Agency is toying with the idea of “grandfathering” the membership of captive insurance affiliates in the Federal Home Loan Bank system, while blocking out others, according to industry observers tracking the matter. Such a final rule would benefit MBS-investing real estate investment trusts that gained entry through a captive. A few years back, several REITs found a loophole in the FHLBank membership rules and exploited it before the FHFA put a moratorium on new captives joining the system. The moratorium expired...
Over the next few weeks, publicly traded real estate investment trusts that specialize in residential mortgages will begin reporting third quarter earnings and the outlook is hardly rosy. “Another difficult quarter for mREITs is behind us,” wrote Keefe, Bruyette & Woods analyst Michael Widner and his team of researchers. “Rate uncertainty has been and remains the sector’s biggest challenge.” In other words, the slow march downward in rates has been...
Although some lenders love having a desk in a high-volume Realtor’s office, others loathe the practice. “I lost so much business to those places over the years,” he said. “I refused to pay $5,000 for a desk…”
Purchase mortgages accounted for 60.2 percent of originations in 2014, but California remained a hotbed of refinance activity, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data for last year. Some 52.8 percent of mortgage originations in the Golden State last year were refi loans, the highest such concentration anywhere in the U.S. House prices and loan amounts are significantly higher in many California markets ... [Includes one data chart]
If the current pace of multifamily business continues, the GSEs will likely exceed their regulator-mandated cap on multifamily support in the aggregate, with Fannie Mae already topping its cap and Freddie Mac lagging a bit.Fannie already exceeded its scorecard cap for 2015, with three months of the year yet to go. For the first three months of 2015, Fannie issued $32.2 billion in multifamily mortgage-backed securities.In the third quarter, Fannie issued $7.3 billion of multifamily MBS backed by new acquisitions, mostly through its Delegated Underwriting and Servicing program. The GSE also resecuritized $1.9 billion of DUS MBS through its Guaranteed Multifamily Structures program during the period ending Sept. 30, 2015. This issuance volume included two Fannie...
Mortgage bankers have been obsessed with regulation for the past five years, with good reason. Yet there was a sense at this week’s annual convention of the Mortgage Bankers Association that the industry is ready to move on. The natural turning point is that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has wrapped up the major pieces of its rulemaking mandates from the Dodd-Frank Act. The new final rule on Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reporting was released late last week, and the widely-dreaded integrated-disclosure requirements went into effect early this month. The so-called TRID still doesn’t sit...
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