A growing number of loans are being dropped from commercial MBS deals before they reach securitization, according to Fitch Ratings. While most of the loans dropped had lower balances, under $20 million, the rating service is concerned that the unusually large amount of loan drops over the last 12 months could point to a lack of due diligence by lenders prior to sending the initial loan information to rating agencies or B-piece buyers. For example, in 28 Fitch-rated deals for the 12-month period ending June 30, 2015, about 1,000 loans were dropped, the rating service said. That number represented 30 percent of the final transaction amount. “There is...

However, the note rate was not disclosed. The originator of record is Wells Fargo Multifamily Capital...

A nationwide roll out of the small-balance product starts next year.

The interim guidelines modify three key areas where lender-complaints have been common, including a revision to the calculation of the owner-occupancy ratio.

A handful of hedge funds were salivating at the prospect of shorting loanDepot's stock...

A rule proposed late last month to impose margin requirements in the single-family “to-be-announced” market would draw in the multifamily housing finance programs of Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae, according to industry trade groups. At issue is SR-FINRA-2015-036, a proposal to amend Financial Industry Regulatory Authority Rule 4210 margin requirements for TBA transactions, including adjustable-rate mortgage transactions, specified pool transactions, and transactions in collateralized mortgage obligations, issued in conformity with a program of an agency or government-sponsored enterprise, with forward settlement dates. In a letter last week to the Securities and Exchange Commission, more than a dozen industry groups expressed...

OCC chief Thomas Curry added: “It’s clear to me that these reserves need to rise to account for the increasing credit risk we are seeing in the system."

Agency multifamily MBS issuance dropped more steeply, by 19.7 percent, but that was from the record $30.91 billion issued during the second quarter of this year.

New securitizations backed by commercial mortgages declined during the third quarter of 2015, but the market at the nine-month mark has nearly matched total issuance for all of last year, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. Some $49.62 billion of income-property mortgages were securitized during the third quarter of 2015, down 15.8 percent from the second quarter. However, with $162.18 billion of commercial mortgage securities issuance through the first nine months of 2015, the market is poised to reach its highest annual volume since the financial crisis when the year ends. Both sides of the market – non-agency CMBS and agency multifamily MBS – saw...[Includes one data table]

While federal regulators issued a final rule setting risk-retention requirements for a variety of MBS and ABS in December 2014, uncertainty regarding implementation persists. Industry participants are seeking guidance from regulators on a variety of issues, including the application of risk retention to asset classes that weren’t prevalent when the Dodd-Frank Act was drafted. “It’s absolutely astonishing how much becomes unclear when you actually sit down to build a risk-retention solution,” Rick Jones, chair of finance and real estate groups at the Dechert law firm, said in a recent commentary. He noted...