Impac Mortgage Holdings will continue to focus on originating non-qualified mortgages after a change in leadership at the nonbank. Joseph Tomkinson, the longtime chairman and CEO of Impac, is scheduled to step down in July, with George Mangiaracina taking over as CEO. Mangiaracina has been an executive vice president and managing director at Impac since early 2015. Since then, Impac has boosted its non-QM production while focusing on refinances of conforming mortgages ...

The Senate last week approved a regulatory relief bill that would grant qualified mortgage status to certain loans held in portfolio by smaller banks even if the mortgages would otherwise be non-QMs. The portfolio QM provision also has support in the House, but it has prompted concerns from some industry analysts. Moody’s Investors Service noted that if the provision becomes law, small banks won’t have to meet certain documentation requirements included in the Consumer ...

The Senate voted 67-31 last week to pass the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, S. 2155, moving the deregulation debate to the House, which will look for more aggressive changes to roll back the Dodd-Frank Act. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, said the House would not pass the bill without additional provisions that would further relax regulations introduced after the 2008 financial crisis ...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, continues to be a pain to CFPB Acting Director Mick Mulvaney. She sent another letter to Mulvaney last week, demanding answers about his leadership of the bureau. Since Mulvaney took over the agency in November 2017, Warren and her colleagues have sent him nine letters including 125 questions and requests. In the most recent letter, Warren accused the acting director of failing to answer or inadequately answering 105 of those questions ...

PHH Corp., which is slated to be bought by Ocwen Financial, is waiting to see if it still has any legal liability from a Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act enforcement matter brought by the CFPB, according to a recent 10-K filing. In January 2018, the en banc court of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reinstated an October 2016 panel decision as it related to RESPA issues, which included vacating the CFPB’s order imposing $109 million of disgorgement ...

Both GSEs have now paid the government the 10 percent compound rate of return required by the original senior preferred stock agreement, according to the R Street Institute. The think tank’s senior fellow, Alex Pollock, said it’s time to put the senior preferred stock purchase agreement to rest. Fannie just recently joined Freddie in this “10 percent moment.” He said because Treasury has received dividend payments from both Fannie and Freddie that equal the economic equivalent of repayment of the entire principal of their senior preferred stock, plus a full 10 percent yield, “it is now entirely reasonable for it to consider declaring the senior preferred stock retired.”

The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. have announced offerings of multiple residential reverse mortgage pools for sale to investors. The HUD pools are comprised of approximately 650 reverse mortgage notes with a total loan balance of about $136 million. The sale consists of due and payable first-lien reverse mortgages secured by single-family, vacant residential properties where all borrowers are deceased and none is survived by a non-borrowing spouse. The reverse-mortgage sale is the third offering of its type. As with past offerings, the sale will be by competitive bidding on April 11, 2018. The loans will be sold without FHA insurance and with servicing released. The loans are expected to be offered in regional pools. Meanwhile, the FDIC will unload in open auction 3,280 FHA-insured reverse-mortgage loans from the ...

Realtors and fair-lending advocates are outraged over reports that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has ordered the removal of language ensuring “inclusiveness and discrimination-free communities” from the department’s mission statement. A spokesperson for HUD denied the report, blaming it on faulty reporting by the Huffington Post on March 6. Carson later followed up with his own denial in an open letter to HUD employees, which the department made public. The initial press report cited a March 5 memo written by Amy Thompson, assistant secretary for public affairs, and addressed to HUD political staff. In the memo, Thompson talked about ongoing efforts to update the mission statement to align HUD’s mission with the Trump administration’s priorities. She added that Carson helped in the development of the new statement as well as urged senior staff to ...

Accounting firm Deloitte & Touche has agreed to pay the federal government $149.5 million to settle False Claims Act liabilities arising from its audits of failed FHA lender Taylor, Bean &Whitaker Mortgage Corp.Deloitte was TBW’s independent outside auditor from 2002 through 2008, when the subprime mortgage market unraveled, triggering a financial and housing crisis. The Department of Justice alleged that, during the period in question, TBW had been running a fraudulent scheme involving the purported sale of fictitious or double-pledged mortgages. According to court documents, Lee Bentley Farkas, former chairman of TBW, and six other banking executives engaged in a more than $2.9 billion fraud scheme that contributed to the failures of Colonial Bank and TBW. Farkas and his crew allegedly misappropriated in excess of $1.4 billion from Colonial Bank’s warehouse lending division in Orlando, FL, and approximately $1.5 billion from Ocala Funding, a mortgage-lending facility controlled by TBW.