Servicing

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is seeing significant improvement in the quality of new business at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a result of tighter underwriting standards promulgated by the two.

Lender Processing Services Inc., Jacksonville, Fla., earned $80 million in the second quarter, a 7% increase from the same period last year.

As Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac increasingly send problem loans back to their seller/servicers for repurchase, banks may not know their full liability in this area, according to a new research report.

Sales of existing homes in Florida rose for the 22nd consecutive month in June, a sign that this beleaguered housing market may be stabilizing.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke said that U.S. housing policy, with its reliance on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is "not sustainable."

A group of private label investors acting through the Dallas law firm of Talcott Franklin PC, said its members now represent ownership interests in about one-third of the $1.5 trillion PLS market.

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston earned $18.7 million in the second quarter, a major improvement compared to the same period last year when it lost $22.9 million.

Kondaur Capital Corp., an active investor in distressed and underperforming mortgages, is marketing a $79 million mortgage-backed security that is collateralized by $263 million of NPL loans.

Lewis Ranieri, the co-inventor of the mortgage backed security, believes the yield on the 10-year Treasury could fall to as low as 2.5% this year.

Every servicer and lender has an in-house servicing platform that measures major compliance milestones. But in today's environment that's not enough to tackle the ever-changing legislation that is constantly coming their way, according to Chris Saitta, president of Equator.

"It's really that granularity of the day-to-day decisions and day-to-day process bifurcated by which portfolio the property is in and which investor and which [mortgage insurance] company. It's a very complex decision process so you need a technology that can get into the granularity of automation."

Equator is an infrastructure Software as a Service provider based in Los Angeles. Currently, the company has 60 servicers on its technology platform, including seven of the top 10.