Secondary Market

The single-family serious delinquency rate for Fannie Mae in February fell another three basis points down to 1.83 percent after dropping to a nine-year low of 1.86 percent in January. Fannie Mae's single-family serious delinquency rate has declined every quarter since the first quarter of 2010 due to a number of reasons that include foreclosure alternatives, home retention solutions, completed foreclosures, improved loan payment performance, and acquisitions of loans with stronger credit profiles.

Charlotte, North Carolina-based RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing Corporation has announced that the firm's co-issue mortgage servicing rights (MSR) purchases grew year-over-year by 257 percent in 2014. The growth has continued into the first quarter of 2015 and management expects that growth to continue throughout the year.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday overturned a decision by an appeals court and granted a writ of certiorari to investors of ING Group, allowing them to continue with their class action suit against ING that accuses the Dutch bank of withholding information about the riskiness of its mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the financial crisis.

Residential mortgage servicing rights sales and valuation advisory services provider MountainView Servicing Group announced Monday that it is acting as adviser for the sale of a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage servicing rights (MSR) portfolio with an unpaid principal balance (UPB) of about $10 billion.

The loans were sold in three pools, and winning bidder for all three was GCAT Management Services 2015-13. The loans were an average of about three years delinquent, meaning it is likely that all the borrowers have been evaluated for or are in some stage of loss mitigation, or are in foreclosure.

With GSE reform a hot topic among government officials and those in the housing industry, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York has issued a report stating that the "path forward for reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac does not look promising" and that failure to wind down the GSEs equated to a "colossal missed opportunity" to put U.S. residential housing finance on more stable footing.

The across-the-board increases in default risk can be attributed to the risk associated with nonbank lending, which is substantially higher than that of big bank loans, according to AEI. The composite NRMI was reported to be 11.93 percent in February, a slight increase of 0.1 percentage points from the prior three-month average and a jump of 0.8 percentage points year-over-year. The composite index just hit a series high of 11.94 percent in January.

Freddie Mac's total mortgage portfolio increased at an annualized rate of 2.8 percent in February, marking the fifth time the portfolio has expanded in the last six months, while the serious delinquency rate for the Enterprise's single-family residential loans continued its steady decline, according to Freddie Mac's February 2015 Monthly Volume Summary released Tuesday.

This will be the second time in as many months that Ocwen has announced an MSR sale on an Agency portfolio of residential loans to Dallas, Texas-based Nationstar. In February, Ocwen announced its intention to sell the MSR on a portfolio of about 81,000 performing residential loans owned by Freddie Mac with a UPB of about $9.8 billion to Nationstar.

In February, an independent study found many of Ocwen’s servicing business was "effective," according to the letter. The research, conducted by Morgan Stanley’s RMBS strategy team, stated, "Whether a borrower first went delinquent while being serviced by Ocwen, or fell delinquent and was then transferred to Ocwen, we find that these borrowers are more likely to be in their homes today than if the MSRs were held elsewhere."