Industry consultant Joe Garrett is telling clients that, “We’ve heard of at least one company that uses a fake rate sheet when recruiting loan officers. As you can guess, it shows really great rates, all fake, of course.”
Who at the GSEs (or at the Federal Housing Finance Agency) was responsible for telling Fannie and Freddie to set aside so much money for loan losses and were those assumptions way off base?
Comments made Wednesday by the Treasury Department’s point man on GSE reform, Michael Stegman, did not go unnoticed by employees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The hunger for GSE speculation is also causing some investors to buy Fannie/Freddie common which has been rising of late, but not by much. However, one GSE watcher believes that buying the common, "is a fool’s game."
According to figures compiled by Inside Mortgage Finance, Flagstar is the nation’s second largest wholesale/broker lender. It also has a fairly large presence in the warehouse market.
The nation’s three largest funders of home mortgages – Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America – this week reported hefty declines in originations during the fourth quarter of 2013. Wells originated $50 billion in residential mortgages during the fourth quarter, a stunning 60 percent decline from the same period a year earlier. The last time this perennial market leader had fundings this low was in the fourth quarter of 2008 when financial markets were reeling worldwide and the U.S. housing market was in the throes of an historic collapse. But Wells’ closest competitors fared...[Includes one data chart]
It may be time for the mortgage industry to take a chill-pill: applications are on the rise again, rates have stabilized and some firms are actually hiring loan officers.
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