Secondary Market

The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) recently welcomed Ron Haynie as president and CEO of ICBA Mortgage, the group's mortgage services subsidiary. Haynie joins the Washington, D.C.-based organization with more than 35 years' experience in mortgage banking, including tenures earlier in his career with Home Federal Bank in Nampa, Idaho, America's Community Bankers, and Freddie Mac.

Wells Fargo will no longer delay foreclosure proceedings in hopes that a short sale deal will come through. At the requests of its mortgage investors, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the bank has stopped granting extensions for distressed homeowners to complete short sales. Going forward, borrowers must close on short sales by the date quoted in their approval letter. The policy change will allow the bank's foreclosure proceedings to advance, even if a short sale is already in negotiation.

Ambac Financial Group, Inc. opened a lawsuit against Bank of America Corp. over improperly underwritten loans the company says the bank's Countrywide unit used to induce it into purchasing mortgage-backed securities. After reviewing 6,533 of the 268,000 loans it insured for Countrywide, Ambac found that 97 percent of the reviewed loans didn't follow the underwriting guidelines Countrywide said it used to assemble loans.

The nation's largest mortgage financier is shrinking its portfolio. Fannie Mae reported this week that its holdings declined at a compound annualized rate of 4.1 percent in August, while its total book of business fell by 1.3 percent. At the same time, delinquency levels fell across the board. Fannie Mae's single-family serious delinquency rate dropped 17 basis points in July to 4.82 percent. The multifamily serious delinquency rate declined 6 basis points to 0.74 percent.

Due to a failed business acquisition with Venn Capital Group Holdings, LLC, Wealthbridge Mortgage will be closing its doors. The Oregon based Wealthbridge has already laid off 16 employees and announced it will lay off its remaining 109 employees in mid-October.

Fannie Mae has enhanced its EarlyCheck technology service to help lenders identify eligibility or data issues with loans they plan on selling to the GSE in order to minimize the risk of repurchases. With EarlyCheck, lenders now have access to Fannie Mae delivery data checks at any point in the business process, allowing them to spot and correct potential underwriting errors earlier in the process - from prior to closing through to the pre-delivery stage.

It's no secret that the volume of distressed residential properties is weighing heavy on U.S. housing markets and prolonging any meaningful recovery. Of even greater concern is the industry's growing backlog of homes that need to be liquidated and resold but have yet to make their way to the market. Standard & Poor's has just released a new report in which it estimates that the principal balance of this shadow inventory now stands at $460 billion and will take the industry about 41 months to clear.

The multifaceted and vast derivatives market can be thorny for even the sharpest of minds. But Udo Onwuachi, a former mortgage trader and authority on collateralized mortgage obligation (CMO) derivatives, says he aims to introduce agency CMO derivatives to a much broader audience an audience that may still be leery of mortgage bonds after the credit crisis fallout.

Legislation to stabilize the foreclosure crisis through the federal government's conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives Tuesday. The Housing Opportunity and Mortgage Equity (HOME) Act would require Fannie and Freddie to allow borrowers to refinance their mortgages by locking in today's record-low interest rates for longer fixed-term loans. The legislation would affect up to 30 million mortgages held or backed by the two GSEs.

The Work Number, an employment and income verification service of Equifax, recently launched a new product, Point In Time, which, according to the company, is a response to market demands for loan-level documentation to investigate repurchases and mortgage insurance rescissions. Designed to provide retro income verification services to validate and document a borrower's employment and income for loan funding, Point In Time was created to help lenders, insurers, and investors automate and streamline the quality assurance process.