Private mortgage insurers could have excess capital of nearly $2 billion by the end of 2019, analysts predict. A recent report from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods suggests the combination of private mortgage insurers’ high returns on equity and increasing use of reinsurance through insurance-linked note deals is creating the largesse. All of the nation’s six active MIs are publicly traded or are owned by a parent company that is. From 2016 through 2018, private MI’s insurance-in-force grew at ...

Ginnie Mae securitized $31.39 billion of FHA single-family purchase loans during the first quarter of 2019, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of agency mortgage-backed securities disclosures. Although that represented an 18.4% drop from the previous quarter, the FHA share of agency purchase loans edged up to 30.8% in early 2019 as other insurance programs saw larger declines. Private mortgage insurance remained ... [Includes one data chart.]

The fourth quarter of 2018 was one of the hardest times in recent memory for companies to generate a profit from their mortgage banking operations. The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that only 44.0% of participants in its quarterly performance survey managed to report positive pre-tax net income for the final three months of last year. This appears to be the lowest share of firms producing positive results in many years, lower than the 54.2% share back in the first quarter of 2014 ...