The mortgage industry has about a month left to officially weigh in on the CFPB’s pending Home Mortgage Disclosure Act proposed rule, and a top official at the bureau urged lenders to raise important issues now. “Because we’re opening HMDA up, we’re taking the opportunity to try to streamline the reporting process for you,” said Kathleen Ryan, deputy assistant director in the CFPB’s Office of Regulations, in comments before the Mortgage Bankers Association’s regulatory compliance conference on Monday. The bureau also is looking “for ways to ease some of the pain around geocoding and these other ‘translation’ issues that you have in your reporting systems by trying to align to the extent possible” with existing industry standards for data points ...

Sources close to the matter noted that Ocwen is involved, but it’s not a trade group.

As Inside the CFPB was going to press, the bureau announced a $35 million enforcement action against Flagstar Bank for allegedly blocking borrowers’ attempts to save their homes, in violation of the CFPB’s mortgage servicing rules. This is the first enforcement action the bureau has initiated based on the new regulation. The regulator alleged that the bank closed borrower applications due to its own excessive delays. “Flagstar took excessive time to review loss mitigation applications, often causing application documents to expire,” said the agency. “To move its backlog, Flagstar would close applications due to expired documents, even though the documents had expired because of Flagstar’s delay.” The CFPB also accused the bank of delaying the approval or denial of borrower ...

The Wells-Ocwen MSR deal is still waiting for Lawsky's green light. But when that will come is another matter...

Pulte Mortgage will install a “modest price” adjustment on its non-QM loans.

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

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

At least a dozen or so national lenders – almost all of them nonbanks – have rolled out lending programs for loans that don’t meet the qualified mortgage standard, and none of them expect to issue a mortgage-backed security this year. Moreover, most aren’t so certain they will be able to issue a security next year either, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t thinking about it. New Penn Financial has created...

The Treasury Department is considering working with an issuer to sell a non-agency MBS that would serve as a benchmark transaction, according to agency officials. The goal of the issuance is to attract investors to the sector and create a standard term sheet for issuers. “The Treasury is thinking about facilitating one or more benchmark transactions,” Michael Stegman, counselor to the Treasury Department for housing finance policy, said this week at the ABS East conference produced by Information Management Network in Miami Beach. He said...

The Treasury Department will have a key role in developing a $1 billion "test" non-agency security.