Fitch said ignoring broker price opinions dramatically increased the likelihood of underestimating potential loss severities and results in insufficient credit enhancement.

Purchase mortgages accounted for 44.4 percent of California’s first-quarter 2014 production, compared to 52.0 percent nationwide.

Freddie CEO Don Layton warns that staffers “at all levels” would flee the secondary market giant amid the five-year transition period, citing several provisions of the bill that are detrimental to employees.

Freddie Mac Multifamily now will purchase from its Targeted Affordable Housing lender network multifamily tax-exempt loans, and aggregate and securitize them into a new series called M-Deals, the GSE announced last week. The move is in concert with the firm’s launch of a new initiative – the Direct Purchase of Tax-Exempt Loans – to help keep rental housing affordable for lower income families and increase cost-effective financing for tax-exempt multifamily properties. Freddie explained these are tax-exempt loans issued by a city, county or state housing finance entity for apartments that have affordable rents for lower income individuals.

The Senate’s GSE reform proposal in its current form would create an extremely high risk for Freddie Mac’s core policy functions during the bill’s proposed five-year wind down of the company, Freddie’s chief executive warned. In a confidential memo to Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt that was leaked to the media, Freddie CEO Donald Layton said that the housing finance reform legislation by Sens. Tim Johnson, D-SD, and Mike Crapo, R-ID, fails to state clearly that the GSEs’ core policy function must be maintained and such an omission would create potentially crippling uncertainty among staffers during the transition.

Did someone in the mortgage industry actually ask one of the GSEs recently to increase the 25 basis point servicing fee that it pays to residential servicers?

Johnson-Crapo requires 12 percent mortgage insurance if the LTV exceeds 80 percent but is no more than 85 percent; 25 percent MI if the LTV exceeds 85 percent but no more than 90 percent; and 30 percent MI if the LTV exceeds 90 percent.

Still, April MBS issuance by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fell short of the anemic $47.0 billion issued in January of this year.

Additional industry layoffs are likely in the months ahead. In the first quarter, all lenders originated just $235 billion in mortgages. It was the weakest production quarter in 14 years.

The first-quarter high-LTV refi market was down 37.1 percent from the fourth quarter and off a hefty 79 percent from the $51.4 billion of business the two GSEs did back in the first three months of last year.