Ocwen Financial’s dry spell of acquiring nonperforming FHA loans out of Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities pools ended in early December with the nonbank servicing giant buying $253.1 million of delinquent product. Speculation, however, is mounting that Ocwen may not be long for the Ginnie Mae business, at least as a servicer. Ocwen’s disclosure of the “early” FHA buyouts came 11 days after it sold to an undisclosed buyer. In the first quarter, the company engaged in $646 million of early buyouts (EBO) and followed up with a $490 million EBO deal in the second quarter. However, EBO volume fell to zero in the third quarter. The December acquisition came in one fell swoop raising cautious, short-term expectations at Ocwen. “We expect to execute more such purchases in the next few months, as long as market conditions are favorable,” said Chief Investment Officer John Britti. As fast as it had ...

The Mortgage Bankers Association this week declined to participate in a panel discussion on FHA hosted by the American Enterprise Institute because the trade group did not believe the discussion would be balanced and though it would favor only a certain point of view. The topic was “FHA from 1934 to 1938: Lessons for Wealth Building,” with Ed Pinto, a resident fellow at AEI, and Dave Stevens, MBA president, as presenters. Stevens, however, decided to pull out of the event when he saw the format. In a letter to the AEI organizers, Stevens said he agreed to be a presenter thinking the debate “would be a balanced approach.” “When I first agreed to do this, I did not expect that the format would be 45 minutes of [Ed Pinto] and then no more than 12 minutes for me to respond,” he wrote. “That’s an extremely lopsided approach that did not appear to be ...

Proposed Data Collection for Evaluating Impact of Pre-Purchase Homeownership Counseling. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has asked the Office of Management and Budget to clear a proposal to collect information for a national study that would gauge the effectiveness of pre-purchase homeownership counseling. Rather than individual telephone interviews, the study plans to conduct focus groups and to collect data regarding the characteristics and performance of participants’ mortgage loans, even after the end of the study. The information collection will involve an estimated 6,000 borrower-participants, 1,800 co-borrowers, 64 counseling organizations and three FHA lenders. The study will be conducted in three cities at a cost of approximately $521,830. The proposal will be published in the ...

Lenders are likely to shift some of their business away from the government-sponsored enterprises and into the non-agency market in the coming years, regardless of GSE reform efforts, according to a report released this week by the Congressional Budget Office. “With house prices expected to trend upward, the balance sheets of lenders and investors should improve, as should borrowers’ financial positions,” the nonpartisan provider of analysis for Congress said. “Consequently, CBO projects that private companies will become more willing to make new loans and demand lower fees to compensate for the credit risks they take, which will reduce Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s pricing advantage over their private competitors.” If the private sector bears more mortgage credit risk, the CBO said...

As the share of investors purchasing homes declines, mortgage financing continues to take market share from cash financing for home purchases, according to the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey. Non-cash financing was used on 72.4 percent of home purchases in November, based on a three-month moving average. That’s up from a 70.7 percent share in November 2013 and a share as low as 66.9 percent in March 2012. Prior to the housing crisis, the non-cash share of total home sales averaged...

President Obama this week signed a comprehensive package of spending bills, providing funding to federal agencies through fiscal 2015 but missing two initiatives that would have toughened FHA enforcement and benefited new homeowners through enhanced housing counseling. The FY 2015 Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act is comprised of 11 funding bills for all federal agencies, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The bill provides...

The 3 percent downpayment mortgages announced this week by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be a better deal than similar FHA financing for stronger-credit borrowers, according to analysts. Final details of the conventional 97 loan-to-value ratio products were released this week to mixed but mostly favorable reviews. Although aimed at first-time homebuyers in Fannie’s MyCommunityMortgage and Freddie’s Home Possible programs, the products are also available for refinances of existing GSE loans.Only 30-year, fixed-rate loans are eligible and the home must be the borrower’s primary residence. In Fannie’s case, borrowers who go through MCM would pay lower upfront loan-level price adjustments. Freddie requires that the loans go through Home Possible. Analysts with FBR Capital Markets said the government-sponsored enterprises’ ...

Jumbo mortgage lending and securitization remained one of the bright spots in the home-loan business during the third quarter of 2014, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis. A total of $81.8 billion in mortgages exceeding the traditional $417,000 conforming loan limit were produced during the third quarter, up 15.4 percent from the second quarter of 2014. Total mortgage originations were up 11.3 percent over the same period. Total jumbo activity included...[Includes three data charts]

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this week officially announced 97 percent loan-to-value ratio programs to a mixed industry response. Fannie’s low-downpayment option will be available through its MyCommunityMortgage program, as well as for refinances and other non-MCM mortgages. Freddie will offer its 3 percent downpayment product as a purchase or no-cash-out refinance in its Home Possible Advantage program. The biggest difference between the two is...

The FHA’s accounting of receivables from settled legal claims and partial claim notes is so sloppy that the exact amount collected might be difficult to gauge, according to an internal audit of the agency’s FY 2014 and 2013 financial statements. Conducted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Inspector General, the audit concluded that the FHA had booked receivables from seven cash settlements totaling $1.2 billion in FY 2014 but collected only $466.4 million of those settlements. In addition, during fiscal 2014, as part of its loss mitigation efforts to bring delinquent loans current, the FHA paid $4.4 billion to lenders for partial claims but never received the required promissory notes from the lenders for $1.5 billion of the claim payments. FHA rules require lenders to provide the agency with promissory notes for the payments made or ...