Servicing

Farmer Mac's chief executive said purchases of loans through the Farmer Mac I and Farmer Mac II programs are at a record pace, as lenders in the agricultural and rural utilities sectors are looking for sources of capital and liquidity.

Even though the nation's megabanks are getting hammered by loan repurchase requests from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, small- to medium-sized nonbanks are escaping mostly unscathed, according to one mortgage advisor.

Navy Federal Credit Union, the largest CU player in mortgages, funded $944 million of single-family loans in the second quarter, a 56% decline from the same period last year.

The Treasury Department late last week quietly corrected its loan performance findings on completed HAMP modifications, which show its results are decent, but nowhere as good as originally reported.

I recently got to chair the SourceMedia Buying and Selling Distressed Mortgage Portfolios Conference in New York City, and I can't imagine a hotter topic (except perhaps loss mitigation). Here's what I said to conference attendees to open the show.

A smaller percentage of U.S. homeowners had so-called "underwater mortgages" in the second quarter as more homes entered the foreclosure process even as price declines slowed, real estate Web site Zillow.com reported today.

MountainView Capital Holdings LLC has acquired Capmark Securities Inc. and a team of fixed-income professionals from Madison Williams and Co. LLC.

NexBank of Dallas has launched a warehouse lending division, offering lines of credit of up to $10 million to nondepositories.

Freddie Mac is getting tough on seller/servicers that are not meeting their obligations to buy back mortgages that went afoul of the GSE's underwriting guidelines.

A recent Bank of America securitization that appears to be the first of its type raises the question of the value of investing in "scratch and dent" reverse mortgages, a specialized part of this government product-dominated market that a select investor base is said to have an appetite for.