Paul Muolo

Warehouse lenders still feel mostly optimistic about their prospects for the remainder of the year, but a recent spike in rates is something that could throw ice water on their outlook.

In this week's National Mortgage News we published a story about an interesting warehouse lender called eWarehouseOne. EWO is interesting for several reasons, including the fact that it claims to have $3 billion in warehouse commitments, but many of the top warehouse managers that we've known for years have never heard of them.

The correspondent lending arm of Wells Fargo Bank this week began publishing a list of third-party originators that it will no longer buy loans from in the secondary market -- as a way to address what it calls "risks" in loan origination.

Dan Magder, a director of acquisitions for Lone Star Funds, has quit the investment firm to focus on what he calls a "REO-to-rental investment opportunity."

Over the past week the interest rate on certain loans have risen by up to 50 basis points, but the residential finance industry is hardly panicking, at least not yet.

Since the start of the financial crisis in September 2008, mortgage companies and banks have foreclosed on roughly 3.3 million homes with no end in sight.

Not only is PennyMac cranking up its correspondent lending platform, but the publicly traded REIT also plans to be an aggressive bottomfisher in the mortgage servicing rights arena.

In the old days every major Wall Street house and mega-lender had a whole loan trading desk. Some survived and some folded. Some continue to concentrate on CRA eligible loans, while others are actively trading nonperforming mortgages.

The Prestwick Mortgage Group is offering investors a GSE 'flow' servicing arrangement that could be as large as $720 million per year in MSRs.

In case you haven't been paying close attention and reading the National Mortgage News website (and our paper weekly) the past year, there's a gargantuan shift underway in the mortgage industry. We correctly predicted that the servicing side of the business is 'deconsolidating.'

Chimera Investment Corp., a publicly traded REIT that invests in MBS, said in a new SEC filing that it has fired its accounting firm, Deloitte & Touche LLP.

It's known as the 'Oops' loan market - where Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac lenders get jammed on a buyback request not because the loan is delinquent, but because one of the GSEs finds an underwriting flaw and demands a repurchase or damages. The seller/servicer then takes that loan and resells it to another buyer.

Mortgage bankers funded roughly $41 billion of jumbo loans in the fourth quarter, a 28% increase from the same period a year earlier, according to exclusive survey figures compiled by National Mortgage News and the Quarterly Data Report.

Management at Ally Financial Corp. is considering throwing part of its mortgage division into bankruptcy and then executing a sale of most of its "good" assets, investment banking sources said late Thursday.

The Mortgage Bankers Association is willing to back a GSE-related refinancing bill introduced by Sen. Al Franken, D., Minn., but wants assurances that the industry will no longer be hit with buyback requests on loans that are several years old.

What's the most common complaint I hear these days from mortgage executives? Answer: too much regulation. I'm not going to sit here and tell you to "get used to it" but we all know that given the continued housing recession/depression that there will be no easing up on the regulatory climate any time soon.

The great land rush to riches in the jumbo securitization market appears to have hit a brick wall.

GMAC Mortgage has hired another former top executive from MetLife Home Loans, this time Randy Levine, who will serve as Southwest regional manager for the national lender.

Remember the good old days when mortgage bankers were considered the "good guys," the ones who put people in houses? And remember when it appeared that plenty of outside capital was itching to get into this industry?

Don't count the mortgage brokerage sector out quite yet. Brokers captured 11.4% of the origination market in the fourth quarter, the highest market share reading since the third quarter of 2010, according to exclusive survey figures compiled by National Mortgage News and the Quarterly Data Report.