The reverse mortgage lending industry has asked Senate lawmakers to expand the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s authority to strengthen its oversight of the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage program. Testifying before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs recently, Peter Bell, president of the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association, said it is crucial for HUD to be able to act swiftly to reduce the risk the program poses to the FHA insurance fund. Bell said HUD needs to implement changes “in a matter of months, not years” and for that to happen, it would need authority from Congress to ...

Reverse Mortgage Solutions, a HECM lender bought by Walter Investment Management Corp. last fall, has received a $100 million warehouse line of credit from Royal Bank of Scotland, according to a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The line is legally structured as a master repurchase agreement. However, it is also considered “uncommitted” and matures in February of 2014. RMS will use the money to fund new originations of HUD-backed home equity conversion mortgages. Several of the nation’s largest banks have exited the HECM space the past two years, including Wells Fargo and Bank of America. A handful of nonbanks have moved ...

It’s far from over, but the years-old plague of mortgage buybacks may be slowly winding down. A new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of bank call reports reveals that banks and thrifts repurchased “only” $2.97 billion during the fourth quarter of 2012. That was down 2.1 percent from the third quarter, but it marked the fifth straight quarterly decline and it was the lowest level since the second quarter of 2009. It brought total repurchases on single-family mortgages, which include indemnifications, to $13.97 billion for all of 2012, a decline of 33.3 percent from the previous year. It was the lowest annual repurchase volume since 2008. An earlier Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of repurchase disclosures made by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac showed...

Freddie Mac ended 2012 with its single best quarterly showing since the company was placed into government conservatorship by the Federal Housing Finance Agency at the height of mortgage market implosion 4½ years ago. The GSE late this week posted fourth quarter net income of $4.5 billion. Compared to the third quarter’s earnings of $2.9 billion, profits grew by 55 percent, the company noted in its Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

Mortgage banking operations owned by banks and thrifts – and that’s most of them – posted their most profitable year ever in 2012, but the tide clearly appeared to be turning in the fourth quarter. A new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call report data shows that banks reported a whopping $31.925 billion in non-interest income from their mortgage banking operations. That was more than six times the $5.240 billion they earned back in 2011, a year when industry-wide results were ... [Includes one data chart]

Although JPMorgan Chase plans to chop 15,000 mortgage-related positions by the end of 2014 and Wells Fargo has closed roughly 90 residential lending joint ventures in the past 12 months, the immediate future for employment is actually decent. Keep in mind that hiring trends are specific to industry niches. Vendors that work on due diligence and foreclosure reviews – such as Allonhill LLC, The Clayton Group and Promontory Financial – have been cutting contract workers for months as ...

During the height of the housing boom, “80-10-10” loan structures became very popular and caused headaches for mortgage insurance firms that lost business to these arrangements, which dodged the need for traditional MI coverage. As the mortgage and housing markets continued on a downward spiral, a new variant emerged that allowed borrowers to take out a conforming first mortgage for 80 percent of the house value and finance the rest with a 20 percent home equity loan. Both versions went the way of the dinosaur ...

Officials at Redwood Trust took pains last week to defend differences in the real estate investment trust’s business model compared with other REITs that focus on investing in mortgage-backed securities. Some investors have been critical of low dividend payments from Redwood, but the REIT said its dividend payments are not directly comparable to other REITs. “Analysts and investors puzzle about how to categorize Redwood and how to value our company,” Martin Hughes and Brett Nicholas ...

Just when you thought the debate over fair value and historical amortized cost has faded into the sunset, along comes a new empirical study that reinforces the view that fair-value calculations are a better predictor of bank failure. Published by the American Accounting Association, the study suggests that leverage based on fair value provides the earliest signal of financial trouble – at least two to three years prior to failure compared to other measurements. This finding is consistent with ...

Commercial banks and savings institutions reported a modest decline in their aggregate investment in residential MBS during the fourth quarter of 2012, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis of call report data. Banks and thrifts held $1.579 trillion of residential MBS at the end of last year, down 2.4 percent from the close of the third quarter. It was the industry’s lowest aggregate position since the end of 2011, but banks still held an historically high 25.0 percent of total MBS outstanding. Compared to the end of 2011, bank MBS holdings were...[Includes two data charts]