The Federal Housing Finance Agency is trying to put a dollar amount on damages it believes Nomura Holdings and RBS Securities should pay after a federal judge found the companies liable in connection with Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s pre-crisis investments in non-agency MBS. Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said the complex case boiled down to whether the defendants accurately described in the offering documents the mortgages that underlie the securities sold to the government-sponsored enterprises. It was...

Delinquencies on commercial MBS hit a post-recession low in January before inching up 10 basis points to 4.72 percent the next month, according to figures compiled by Fitch Ratings Service. Then again, Fitch appears to be mostly bullish on the sector, noting that the uptick in late payments was caused by a change in its methodology and that under the old rules delinquencies would have fallen to 4.55 percent. The ratings change excluded deals backed by wireless towers, outdoor advertising and what it calls “certain other non-traditional transactions.” Hotel collateral has...

The Federal Housing Finance Authority announced on May 7 that it is easing loan limits on certain types of multifamily mortgages to exclude them from imposed $30 billion financing caps set on the GSEs earlier in the year. While the $30 billion cap on new multifamily lending won’t change, the FHFA is revising the excluded category to “facilitate continued liquidity in the multifamily finance market which has increased substantially since the initial cap was set.” With continuing growth in the multifamily market, analysts said there is a growing concern that the GSEs may hit the cap by the third quarter. Industry insiders also said that one of the goals is to ease the concern of both a possible tightening....

Fannie Mae reported Tuesday that the GSE issued $10.4 billion of multifamily MBS in the first quarter of 2015, primarily through its delegated underwriting and servicing program.

The jump in private CMBS issuance helped offset what looks like a sharp slowdown in agency multifamily MBS production.

A total of $49.55 billion of commercial mortgages were securitized during the first quarter of 2015, virtually unchanged from the fourth quarter of last year, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. But the private CMBS market recorded a significant increase in new issuance. Non-agency CMBS production climbed 31.3 percent from the fourth quarter to hit $30.91 billion, the second-highest three-month output since the financial crisis shut down new issuance in the second quarter of 2008. Compared to the first quarter of 2014, new issuance was up 74.3 percent. The jump in private CMBS issuance helped offset...[Includes one data chart]

Freddie Mac announced this week that it has securitized more than $100 billion in multifamily mortgages through its K-Deal program, a milestone for the initiative that was launched in 2009. K-Deals were introduced during the financial crisis when the CMBS market collapsed. Freddie created the program to help revive the market, but it had to convince lenders that selling a loan via securitization was better than selling a loan that Freddie would hold in its portfolio. “In 2008, when we first started talking to investors about doing a CMBS-style securitization, some of them thought...

Another post-crisis trend is that the volume of Fannie’s multifamily financing had shrunk more than Freddie’s...

Funds managed by Blackstone Tactical Opportunities issued the first multi-borrower single family rental security this week and the market appears to be set to grow throughout the year, according to industry analysts. The $229.53 million B2R Mortgage Trust 2015-1 was issued this week with AAA ratings from Fitch Ratings. “We think...

The GSEs have provided multifamily financing for more than two decades, but their dwindling role has some worried that it has adverse effects on the underserved and low-income segment of the multifamily market. Although the Federal Housing Finance Agency said it is working to slow the decline, an April brief by the Urban Institute pointed out that with the increasing demand and costs of renting, the agency may need to do more in maintaining or increasing the GSE role in multifamily. In the past 25 years, the dollar volume of GSE multifamily financing has grown from $4.5 billion in 1990 to more than $57 billion at the end of 2014. But recent declines show that Fannie’s and Freddie’s