Bayview Loan Servicing appears to be one of the few nonbanks offering non-agency products at competitive interest rates and holding the loans in portfolio. The lender has recently been pushing non-agency qualified mortgages and non-QMs for correspondent lenders and wholesalers. Bayview has been in the mortgage business for more than 18 years and is minority-owned by affiliates of The Blackstone Group. The lender offers a number of products for near-miss agency borrowers as well as non-QMs with guidelines that are more forgiving than those offered by jumbo lenders for similar products ...

The frequently-asked-questions guidance to using the FHA’s consolidated Single Family Policy Handbook is good to have though it shows just how complicated the FHA’s mortgage origination process is, according to lenders. In fact, the updated FHA handbook could still be confusing to borrowers simply because a lot more information is concentrated in one source, lenders said. According to the FHA, the more than 290 FAQs will enable lenders to make operation adjustments before the handbook goes into effect on Sept. 14, 2015. The FAQs are for information purposes only and do not apply to current FHA policies. They do not establish or modify policy contained in the handbook. The FAQs reiterate information in the handbook under headings such as Credit Underwriting, Closing and Insuring, FHA System Support and Consumer Information. Industry observers noted that the FAQs did not ...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau boosted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac business by some $132.9 billion when it gave the two government-sponsored enterprises a free pass on the debt-to-income ratio requirements of the qualified-mortgage rule. For the non-agency world, a qualified mortgage has to have a DTI ratio of 43 percent or less. While the government-insured market has its own QM rules that effectively ignore DTI, a loan eligible for sale to the GSEs is considered a qualified mortgage if it meets all the QM criteria – such as no interest-only payments – other than the DTI cap. From the beginning of 2014 through the end of the first quarter of this year, about 16.3 percent of the loans securitized by Fannie and Freddie had...[Includes two data tables]

A number of recent headline-generating fair lending settlements may have focused largely on issues of pricing disparities, but there has been a sea change among policymakers these days moving in the direction of greater access to mortgage credit, some industry experts say. During an Inside Mortgage Finance webinar this week, Jeffrey Naimon, a partner in the Washington, DC, office of the BuckleySandler law firm, said the industry is seeing a pendulum swing from the focal point of concern being loan pricing to loan access. “Especially during the time when subprime loans were available, there was a lot of concern that minority borrowers were being steered into higher-cost subprime loans,” he told attendees. “The adoption of the loan originator compensation rule by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau affected...

The only thing that kept the qualified-mortgage rule from devastating mortgage production was the temporary loophole that allows Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the government-insurance programs to treat loans with debt-to-income ratios above 43 percent as QMs, an industry official said. “Many have referred to QM as the Y2K moment for mortgages: nothing happened. We all thought this thing was going to implode. And yet there wasn’t too much of a glitch,” said Rod Alba, senior regulatory counsel at the American Bankers Association, during the ABA’s annual regulatory compliance conference in Washington, DC, this week. “At the macro level, that’s...

With the effective date of the CFPB’s TILA/RESPA Integrated Disclosures rule just weeks away, lender representatives continue appealing to Congress for formal enforcement relief, while vendors are scrambling to finish their work products and deliver them to clients in time for testing. But TRID may not be as bad as everyone seems to fear. “In conversation with industry participants, the actual impact of these rules is a key debatable point, with consensus believing that the rules may have a temporary drag on origination volumes in the second half of 2015,” said analysts at FBR Capital. But it will not be as drastic as the impact the qualified-mortgage rule had on origination volumes in the second half of 2014, they said. ...

Democratic leadership in the Senate and the House have introduced the Community Lender Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act of 2015 as an alternative to the GOP-sponsored regulatory relief bill approved by the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Most of the provisions in the Democrat legislation were proposed as amendments to the Senate bill and rejected by the Republican majority. The Democrat bill would grant qualified-mortgage status for loans held in portfolio, but only for smaller financial institutions. Banks and credit unions with less than $2 billion in consolidated assets which originate fewer than 2,000 mortgages per year could make loans that exceed the 43 percent debt-to-income ratio under the QM standard and still receive safe harbor status ...

Industry Groups Urge Restructuring of CFPB. Wading into risky political territory, a number of industry groups last week urged Congress to support H.R. 1266, legislation that would revamp the governing structure of the CFPB. Submitting a statement for the record to the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit, the industry groups said consumers and the industry would be better served by changing the CFPB governance structure from a single director to a bipartisan five-person commission as used by other federal agencies. “The CFPB has tremendous authority to supervise a multi-trillion dollar industry, which as we have learned, can have incredible ramifications on our economy,” the statement said. “As such, it is imperative the CFPB remain stable ...

Lenders offering nonprime loans that do not meet the qualified-mortgage standard have run into difficulties generating volume because weak secondary-market demand has made pricing on the loans unattractive to borrowers. Jeff Lemieux, until recently a vice president at Bayview Asset Management, said volume in nonprime non-QMs is extremely weak across the industry. “The consumer is resistant to the pricing,” he said. Lemieux said credit-impaired borrowers feel that ...

Underwriting standards on jumbo mortgages tightened slightly in May compared with the previous month, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The results reversed six consecutive months of looser jumbo underwriting. Two-thirds of the 182 banks recently surveyed by the American Bankers Association said their originations in 2014 included non-qualified mortgages. Non-QMs accounted for 10 percent of the banks’ originations ... [Incluides three briefs]