The Mortgage Bankers Association is projecting that more than 4,600 residential finance professionals will attend its annual convention in Denver next month.
Although Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae have all granted consumer forbearance on homes damaged by this season’s hurricanes, servicers must continue to make payments to MBS investors in most circumstances, a situation that could affect thinly capitalized nonbanks. In particular, smaller privately held nondepositories that became Ginnie issuers this decade could face some financial headwinds, depending on how heavily concentrated their business has been in the Texas Gulf region and south Florida. As Inside MBS & ABS went to press late this week, it was...
A former employee of Standard & Poor’s Rating Services beat fraud charges alleging she loosened S&P’s rating methodology for commercial MBS to generate business for her employer. However, she was found liable of the lesser charge of negligence for failing to disclose the change. In his initial Aug. 29 decision, Administrative Law Judge James Grimes of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s administrative court said that while Barbara Duka did change the firm’s rating methodology for CMBS, he found no evidence that she intended to manipulate, deceive or defraud investors. Rather, Duka, manager of S&P’s CMBS rating group, did...
The commercial MBS market is facing a new challenge as questions have been raised about the “true sale” treatment of these transactions under generally accepted accounting principles. The issue arises from risk-retention requirements that went into effect in late 2016. “Failure of accounting sale treatment means the selling bank cannot book the gain and does not derecognize the underlying loans resulting in the entire portfolio of loans remaining on its balance sheet for both GAAP and presumably, for risk based capital purposes,” according to the Dechert law firm. In order to benefit from an accounting true sale, each third-party holder of a beneficial interest in the securitization must have...
The proposed $4.3 billion merger of single-family rental operators Invitation Homes and Starwood Waypoint Homes will create a corporate landlord with 82,000 homes – and a behemoth of a potential client for Fannie Mae and possibly Freddie Mac. Earlier this year, Fannie agreed to provide Invitation Homes with $1 billion in financing. The deal broke new ground for the government-sponsored enterprise, but it also raised questions about whether a government-owned entity that received billions in taxpayer assistance should be lending money to a company (Invitation Homes) grubstaked by Wall Street. Since the Invitation-Fannie arrangement was unveiled, no other significant SFR financing vehicles involving a GSE has...
In the new world of risk retention and commercial real estate securitization, direct issuance could be a potential financing alternative should third-party risk-retention capital become inadequate to meet demand, according to a CRE debt market expert. Direct issuance and other alternative types of transactions may become increasingly viable in addressing the difficulty of refreshing on an ongoing basis the amount of capital necessary to float the commercial MBS industry, said Rick Jones, a partner with Dechert and co-chair of the firm’s finance and real estate group. Jones cited...
The Senate Committee on Appropriations last week unanimously approved legislation setting aside $40.2 billion in discretionary funding for the Department of Housing and Urban Development for fiscal 2018. The Senate HUD appropriations bill passed by a vote of 31-0 and, like the House version, did not include authority for HUD to charge a fee to cover FHA’s administrative costs and systems upgrades as proposed in the Trump administration’s budget request. Rather, both bills set aside $130 million for administrative expenses with the House adding another $5 million for technological improvements. In addition, the committee recommended...
The biggest surge was in non-agency securitization of mortgages on hotels and other lodging properties, which jumped 88.7 percent from the first quarter.
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