Seller repurchases of Fannie/Freddie loans rose 17% from the first to the second quarter, with 82% of them related to loans securitized in 2018 and 2019.
Roughly 30% of mortgage originations in 2018 were sold by lenders to an unaffiliated buyer. Correspondent activity was strongest in the government-insured market.
Mortgage lenders continued to repurchase significantly more Freddie loans than Fannie loans, although buyback activity still represents a tiny fraction of GSE business.
Read the tea leaves: Just 56.4% of second-quarter loan originations have been pooled in MBS. In recent years, the overall securitization rate has run at about 70%.
Nearly $320 billion of newly originated home loans were funneled into the MBS market during the second quarter, but that represented just 56.4% of new production in the primary mortgage market.
DBRS and Fitch were the top rating services in non-agency MBS mostly because they cover a lot of scratch-and-dent transactions. S&P excels in nonprime, Moody's in jumbo.
The conforming-jumbo business might be an attractive target for shrinking the GSE footprint as the loan limit is poised to top $500,000. But it's not clear it would de-risk Fannie/Freddie business.