Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continued to trim their retained investment portfolios in late 2015 with most of the focus on shrinking their non-agency MBS and holdings of their own securities. Freddie Mac’s retained mortgage portfolio declined 15.1 percent last year, ending at $346.91 billion, safely below the $359.3 billion cap set by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The government-sponsored enterprise reduced its non-agency MBS holdings by $25.60 billion, or 38.8 percent, from its yearend 2014 level. While that included hefty declines in both subprime and Alt A MBS, the biggest decline, 41.3 percent, was...[Includes one data table]
The Obama administration’s recently proposed federal budget is projecting a $61 million profit for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Section 502 single-family guaranteed housing program in FY 2017. The president’s budget proposal projects $900 million in new direct USDA rural housing mortgage loans in fiscal 2017, the same number of loans projected for fiscal 2016. For 2017, the USDA is seeking...
Officials at American Capital Agency announced last week that the real estate investment trust formed a wholly-owned broker-dealer subsidiary. The broker-dealer will help provide the REIT with repo funding and to-be-announced MBS trade-clearing capabilities. Peter Federico, a senior vice president and chief risk officer at American Capital, said the REIT started forming the broker-dealer about six months ago. He said the entity is fully staffed and is in the regulatory application process, with operations expected to begin midyear. “Once our broker-dealer is up and running, we will pursue...
Redwood noted that although it is quitting commercial mortgage production, it will continue to “opportunistically invest in mezzanine and subordinate CMBS tranches that meet our risk/return profile.”
Housing reform legislation that would ease FHA restrictions on condominium financing and allow delegation of loan approval authority to qualified lenders under the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s rural housing programs this week passed the House by a vote of 427-0. Described as an FHA reform bill, H.R. 3700, the “Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act,” would make several incremental changes across a number of federal housing programs. It would modify...
All three agencies posted big increases in multifamily MBS issuance last year, with Freddie (up 65.4 percent) and Fannie (up 36.4 percent) leading the way…
The surging multifamily housing market in the U.S. was a major factor in the huge increase in commercial MBS issuance last year, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. A total of $206.66 billion of income-property mortgages were securitized during 2015, a 22.6 percent increase from the previous year. It was the strongest annual output of commercial MBS since 2007, the year before the wheels fell off the non-agency CMBS market. New issuance rebounded...[Includes one data table]
The credit quality of U.S. conduit/fusion commercial MBS kept degrading during the fourth quarter of 2015, while conduit loan leverage is rising and is expected to continue to do so, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service. Conduit loan leverage as measured by the Moody’s Loan to Value (MLTV) ratio ticked upward from 118.2 percent in the third quarter last year to 118.9 percent in the fourth quarter. This is the third time in which that metric has topped the pre-crisis peak level of 117.5 percent, the ratings service said. Further, the conduit loan MLTV rose...
One observer who follows the program had this to say: “It’s nice of them [FHA] to give money away in an election year. It’s not like they need the volume.”
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