Strong demand in the secondary market for jumbo mortgages lifted Redwood Trust’s mortgage banking income during the third quarter even though the volume of loans it acquired declined. Redwood had $11.24 million in non-interest income from mortgage banking activities in the third quarter, up 5.9 percent from the previous quarter. The metric tracks Redwood’s loan aggregation and sales. The real estate investment trust’s jumbo conduit acquired mortgages with an unpaid principal balance ...

Waterfall Asset Management announced that it launched a residential mortgage conduit to focus on partnering with lenders to originate proprietary mortgage products under flow agreements. The conduit aims to purchase prime and near-prime mortgages with relatively high loan-to-value ratios. An affiliate of Caliber Home Loans is preparing to issue a $354.5 million nonprime mortgage-backed security, according to presale reports by DBRS and Fitch Ratings ... [Includes four briefs]

Deal structure – everything from pre-issuance loan reviews to enforcement mechanisms when things go wrong – vary significantly in the non-agency MBS market, experts noted at the Structured Finance Industry Group’s recent residential mortgage conference in New York.

Jumbo and nonprime MBS production is having its best year since the financial crisis but growing pains are clear, according to experts at the Residential Mortgage Finance Symposium sponsored by the Structured Finance Industry Group in New York this week.

Companies that specialize in whole-loan trading are looking at a somewhat brighter future thanks to increasing volumes in the expanded-credit market, but it remains to be seen whether trading desks will return to the halcyon days of the pre-crisis environment.

Buoyed by strong investor demand, new issues of non-agency MBS have “flourished” in recent years, according to Kroll Bond Rating Agency.

Trends in underwriting expanded-credit mortgages differ from what’s happening in the broader market, according to a new analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. Lenders have generally started to loosen standards for debt-to-income ratios and loan-to-value ratios as originations decline and the product mix shifts from refinances to purchase mortgages. However, in the expanded-credit market, credit characteristics were largely stagnant in the past year ... [Includes one data chart]

A test of the jumbo mortgage-backed security market by Wells Fargo went well enough that the bank plans to regularly issue deals after avoiding the market for years. “Based on the positive response from investors to Wells Fargo’s recent private residential MBS transaction and given acceptable market conditions, we expect to do periodic offerings of private residential MBS going forward,” said Tom Goyda, a spokesman for the bank. The $441.3 million issuance from Wells that closed ...

New Residential plans to be a consistent issuer of mortgage-backed securities with non-qualified mortgages and the real estate investment trust is not just looking for loans from its recently acquired New Penn Financial. The first non-QM MBS from New Residential closed this week. All of the loans in the deal were originated by New Penn, an originator New Residential acquired in early July. Michael Nierenberg, chairman, president and CEO of New Residential, said the REIT is ...

An affiliate of Verus Mortgage Capital revised the structure of a planned non-agency mortgage-backed security, opting for a more traditional approach after initially planning to test a unique variation. The planned closing date for the $442.3 million issuance was also pushed back. When presale reports for Verus Securitization Trust 2018-3 were published in mid-October, the deal was structured with an initial pro rata structure that would shift to a sequential structure. The MBS ...