The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced this week that the baseline conforming-loan limit for the government-sponsored enterprises will remain unchanged in 2016 at $417,000. High-cost loan limits will increase in 39 counties next year, up to a maximum of $625,500 in the continental U.S. Fitch Ratings downgraded various servicer ratings for Residential Credit Solutions last week. The rating service said regulatory scrutiny ... [Includes four briefs]

Ocwen Financial continues to work toward satisfying regulatory requirements that would allow the nonbank to resume acquisitions of mortgage servicing rights. However, officials stress that MSR acquisitions aren’t the main focus for the company. “Right now, I don’t see in the marketplace a lot of opportunities for the kind of servicing transfers that would interest Ocwen and that’s why we’re focusing more of our efforts on generating new assets ... [Includes one data chart]

A new research paper aims to settle the debate about whether loose underwriting or the downturn in home prices was the biggest factor in the poor performance of subprime mortgages originated before the financial crisis. There was a sharp divergence in the performance of subprime mortgages originated in 2003 and those originated in 2006 and 2007. Some have suggested that the subprime mortgages originated just before the crash defaulted at higher rates largely because underwriting standards on the loans deteriorated, while others claim the main issue was that house price declines left the borrowers with negative equity. A paper by Christopher Palmer, a professor of real estate at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, claims...

Issuance of non-mortgage ABS fell 31.7 percent from the second quarter of 2015 to the third quarter, with significant declines in most major sectors, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking and analysis. A total of $37.00 billion of ABS were issued in the third quarter, well off the pace set in the first half of the year. On a year-to-date basis, new ABS production was down 4.5 percent from the first nine months of 2014. That puts in jeopardy the string of four consecutive annual increases in ABS issuance since 2010 as the market enters the final lap of the year. Vehicle finance deals remained...[Includes two data tables]

The performance of U.S. residential MBS keeps getting better, thanks mostly to favorable economic conditions, but the effects of greater regulatory oversight and intervention can be positive or negative, and sometimes both, depending on what hat a participant in the secondary market wears, according to experts at Moody’s Investors Service. “RMBS performance continues to improve, and that’s mainly because of the confluence of two factors: fewer borrowers are becoming delinquent for the first time because of the economy, and re-default rates on loans which have been modified – which is a significant share of the population of private-label MBS loans – continue to be stable,” said Youriy Koudinov, vice president and senior credit officer at Moody’s. “The second point we want to convey is...

Fitch Ratings placed a negative outlook on a number of servicer ratings for Caliber Home Loans this week. The rating service said the revision from a stable outlook was due to “rapid growth and heightened regulatory scrutiny.” Caliber was the 19th-ranked servicer as of the end of the second quarter of 2015, according to affiliated publication Inside Mortgage Finance. The nonbank handled a $75.23 billion portfolio, which increased by 27.1 percent compared with ...

A company that helped Ocwen Financial reduce the capital it needed for servicing non-agency mortgages was fined last week by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The federal regulator charged Home Loan Servicing Solutions for misstatements and inadequate internal controls. HLSS agreed to pay a $1.5 million penalty to settle the charges while not admitting to or denying the findings. The SEC noted that William Erbey, Ocwen’s former executive chairman ...

The supply of home mortgage debt outstanding started growing again during the second quarter of 2015, thanks to relatively strong growth in retained portfolios, according to an Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of new data from the Federal Reserve and other sources. The Fed reported late last week that $9.901 trillion of single-family mortgage debt was outstanding as of the end of June. That was up 0.4 percent from March and represented the biggest supply of mortgage servicing since the third quarter of 2013. The servicing market had been shrinking...[Includes two data tables]

The serious delinquency rate on subprime mortgages continued to improve in the second quarter of 2015 while the amount of subprime mortgages outstanding also dwindled. An estimated $330.0 billion in subprime mortgages were outstanding as of the end of the second quarter of 2015, according to Inside Nonconforming Markets. The volume was down by 14.5 percent compared with the second quarter of 2014. In that time, the serious delinquency rate ... [Includes one data chart]

The monitor of a $2.0 billion settlement involving Ocwen Financial revealed last week that the nonbank was found to have failed another metric under the settlement. However, the monitor noted that Ocwen has worked to address many of the issues that have dogged the company over the past year. The monitor re-tested Ocwen on a number of metrics under the settlement due to concerns that were raised about the integrity of the servicer’s internal review group ...