Rising prices for mortgage servicing rights in the second quarter of 2013 helped lure sellers to a market that continues to see a decline in available product and improving fundamentals. The Federal Reserve this week reported that the long, steady decline in home mortgage debt outstanding – a streak that has now run six and a half years – continued through the midway point in 2013. As of the end of June, home mortgage debt outstanding was down to $9.833 trillion, a 0.4 percent drop from March and a hefty 12.9 percent decline from the all-time high ($11.287 trillion) set back in March 2008. A new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis reveals...[Includes two data charts]
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Bargain hunters are beginning to eye the mortgage market, hoping to pick up franchises at a discount to prices paid in 2012 and earlier this year. But getting capital-rich companies to sell – even with refinance production dwindling – could prove to be a challenge. “We haven't seen any efforts to re-price transactions in process,” said Chuck Klein, managing partner of Mortgage Banking Solutions, Woodway, TX. “If volume and profits are falling below the budget and forecast on deals at the discussion level, then the seller must be able to present a reasonable explanation of how they are to achieve projections in their budget and growth.” Larry Charbonneau, who runs Charbonneau & Associates, another Texas-based consultancy, said...
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If mortgage lenders don’t have enough to worry about with six new major mortgage rules from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that all take effect in January, they also face a heavier Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reporting burden and perhaps a greater litigation threat from some developments at the bureau. Last week, as the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council was releasing the 2012 HMDA data, the CFPB came out with a set of online HMDA tools to enable consumers to explore mortgage application and loan data at a local level. “Just as the real estate motto ‘location, location, location’ was...
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Although Nationstar Mortgage has delayed loan closings in certain production channels due to what it calls a “switch” in document custodians, it continues to tap the capital markets for debt and servicing advances. This week alone, the nation’s sixth largest residential servicer priced $225 million in senior notes, and inked a deal for a new $1 billion servicing advance facility with Wells Fargo serving as trustee and Barclays Bank as the administrative agent. The lender is actually Barclays. A spokesman for the nonbank told...
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The House Republic legislation to eliminate the government-sponsored enterprises and replace them with private capital has no chance of passing in the Senate, according to Sen. Bob Corker, R-TN. He said the bipartisan approach he crafted with Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA, has a better chance of passing through Congress and maintaining wide availability of 30-year fixed-rate mortgages. “Going to a completely privatized system today to me is not something that has one chance of passing,” Corker said late last week in a conversation with Warner, hosted by Zillow. Corker was referring to H.R. 2767, the Protecting American Taxpayers and Homeowners Act, which the House Financial Services Committee approved in July. The bill isn’t on the House’s fall legislative agenda. “What Mark and I have done is...
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The number of loans repurchased by lenders from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fell sharply during the second quarter from the record level set during the first three months of 2013, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of repurchase disclosures by the two government-sponsored enterprises. In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the two GSEs reported a total of $2.81 billion of mortgage repurchases during the second quarter, down 78.7 percent from the first quarter of 2013. GSE buybacks hit a record $13.21 billion in the first three months of 2013 as Fannie and Bank of America resolved their dispute over legacy loans sold to the GSE by Countrywide Financial. The settlement also helped wipe out...[Includes one data chart]
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A federal district court judge in Manhattan this week rejected Wells Fargo’s plea to dismiss a lawsuit alleging it lied about the quality of home loans submitted to the Department of Housing and Urban Development for FHA insurance over a 10-year period. District Court Judge Jesse Furman allowed government claims under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989 to proceed but ruled that legal injury claims based on events that transpired before June 2009 were time-barred and that the government had waited too long to file a lawsuit. The judge also threw out claims of negligence and unjust enrichment. The government filed...
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