Waypoint Real Estate Group confirmed this week that it received a $65.0 million loan from Citigroup to finance rentals of real estate owned properties. Industry analysts suggest that the financing from Citi is the first for the emerging sector from the debt markets and securitization of REO rental proceeds is expected soon. Officials at Waypoint said they could issue an REO rental security fairly quickly. However, before the Citi deal they noted that they were seeing better terms from balance-sheet lenders than from REO rental securitization. The rating services have issued...

Banks and thrifts held a record $158.5 billion of non-mortgage ABS in their investment portfolios as of the midway point in 2012, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking and analysis. The depository institutions increased their ABS holdings by 3.1 percent during the quarter, pushing them past the previous record of $154.9 billion at the end of 2009. Bank and thrift ABS holdings have jumped by 14.1 percent since the fourth quarter of 2011. The biggest chunk of bank ABS holdings is...[Includes one data chart]

The Federal Reserve’s plan to purchase an additional $40 billion in agency MBS per month, above and beyond the $25 billion to $30 billion the Fed has been buying, will primarily benefit the agency MBS sector but could also spur revitalization of the non-agency market, analysts say. The open-ended plan, in effect until the U.S. economy and employment picture show significant improvement, adds some $480 billion in annual demand for agency MBS, a market that is on track to produce about $1.5 trillion in gross issuance. “The pressure on asset values to richen further will be substantial,” said analysts at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. The additional MBS purchases and ongoing principal investments will...

Mortgage originations reported under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act declined by 11.2 percent from 2010 to 2011, according to an Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of HMDA data released this week by federal regulators. A total of $1.399 trillion of purchase and refinance mortgage originations were reported under HMDA for last year, as well as $26.0 billion of home-improvement loans. The dollar volume of loan applications was down slightly more, falling 11.4 percent from 2010, and the loan denial rate drifted slightly lower, to 17.7 percent. African-Americans and Hispanic loan applicants continued to have higher loan rejection rates, although both groups followed the overall trend toward lower denial rates. The most common reason cited for rejecting a loan application was...[Includes one data chart]

A ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee this week gave notice that GOP lawmakers will be looking to rein in the Federal Reserve’s “radical” and unfettered influence and authority over the nation’s financial system during the 113th Congress next year. Rep. Scott Garrett, R-NJ, chairman of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government Sponsored Enterprises, outlined his two top priorities for Congress in 2013 just as the Federal Open Market Committee announced plans to add about $40 billion a month to its massive agency MBS portfolio. Garrett said the committee’s first priority will be...

The mortgage securitization rate through the first half of 2012 was down a few ticks from the record level reached in the first quarter of the year, but the market remained dominated by lending for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae MBS programs. A huge 91.5 percent of new mortgage originations were financed through the agency MBS programs during the first half of 2012, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. That’s down from the 95.8 percent securitization rate achieved in the first quarter, but it’s comfortably ahead of the securitization rates posted since the financial crisis of 2008. The sky-high securitization rate is partly due...[Includes one data chart]

The Securities and Exchange Commission has decided to set aside efforts to standardize credit ratings due to serious concerns raised by credit rating agencies and other market participants. Instead, the SEC said it will focus on rulemaking under the Dodd-Frank Act to achieve transparency in credit rating performance and in the methods used to determine credit ratings. In a mandated report to Congress on the standardization of credit ratings, the SEC said...

As unpalatable as it may sound to MBS investors, a hedge fund executive said it’s well past time for the mortgage industry to cut its losses by forgiving principal and re-underwriting troubled mortgages to more traditional criteria in order to revitalize the sector and the broader economy. Michael Corasaniti, chief executive officer of Tourmalet Advisors, a hedge fund in New York City, told attendees at the American Mortgage Conference sponsored by the North Carolina Bankers Association this week that old-fashioned manual underwriting is the way out. “Early in my career, I was...

SunTrust Banks, Inc. is planning to shift $3 billion of loans, including an undetermined number of delinquent Ginnie Mae loans and other nonperforming loans, to its held-for-sale portfolio and record a $375 million provision for mortgage repurchases in the third quarter of 2012. The moves are expected to strengthen SunTrust’s mortgage portfolio and put the company in a better position by improving its risk profile and balance sheet and stabilizing its capital ratios. The $3 billion transfer of loans to the held-for-sale (HFS) category will include ... (1 chart)

Uncertainty about risk in a rapidly changing regulatory environment and the still destabilized economics of the housing market continue to keep private capital from returning to the mortgage market, according to industry officials at this week’s American Mortgage Conference sponsored by the North Carolina Bankers Association. “Everybody’s very concerned about the role of the government, that the government is supporting too much of the marketplace today,” said Meg Burns, senior associate director for housing and regulatory policy for the Federal Housing Finance Agency. “But it’s really hard to envision how people can pull back from that government support when we don’t actually understand not only who holds the credit risk but what the requirements are for retaining that risk in terms of capital.” All of the Dodd-Frank Act regulations that are still in play are...