Servicing

In the first quarter, 88% of the homeowners who refinanced their homes got a mortgage at least 5% larger than the original loan, the highest percentage since the second quarter of 1990, according to Freddie Mac.The percentage was up from 86% in the previous quarter and 72% a year earlier, the government-sponsored enterprise said in its quarterly refinance review. "The staying power of refinance activity has been much stronger than we initially thought," said Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac's chief economist. "But borrowers are reacting to both incentives to cash out home equity through refinance and incentives to change their mortgage as they hit an interest rate adjustment." In the second quarter, 42% of all mortgage applications were for refinancings, down from 44% in the first quarter, Freddie Mac reported.

Freddie Mac chairman and chief executive Richard Syron says he is pleased with the mortgage company's first-half business results, including a $1.3 billion profit in the first quarter."We have increased our credit guarantee business by about 10% in the first half," Mr. Syron said during a teleconference late Tuesday. He noted that the portfolio growth was less than 4%, but said "we have not seen consistent opportunities for growth at attractive spreads." Freddie Mac just agreed to limit the growth of its portfolio to 2% a year. Freddie estimates that first-quarter earnings came it at $1.3 billion and says they would have been higher except that the mortgage company took a $300 million adjustment as part of a correction due to its 2005 audited results. "Business results have been pretty good," Mr. Syron said. Freddie Mac executives said the company had a fair value return on equity of 10% in the first quarter and can generate annual returns in the low to mid-teens without portfolio growth. Freddie Mac can be found online at http://www.freddiemac.com.

Jim Judd, president and chief operating officer of World Savings, has been named to lead the combined mortgage operations of Wachovia Corp. and Golden West Financial Corp., which will be based in Charlotte, N.C., following the completion of Wachovia's acquisition of Golden West.Wachovia said the combined operations will be called the Retail Mortgage and Credit Group, and that all current mortgage and credit operations sites of both companies will remain in place. Wachovia said the pending merger with Golden West, the Oakland, Calif.-based parent company of World Savings, is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter. Wachovia can be found online at http://www.wachovia.com.

Origination services and default management services are the fastest-growing segment of mortgage processing services, according to NelsonHall, a Boston-based firm specializing in the analysis of business process outsourcing.In a research report titled "Mortgage BPO Industry Assessment and Forecast," the firm said customers want mortgage BPO vendors to help them convert fixed costs to variable costs in order to deal with fluctuating volumes. The research also found that mortgage BPO contracts are typically limited to one of four service areas (origination, servicing, default management, and securitization) in the United States, while such contracts usually cover multiple service areas outside the United States. "Vendors need to be able to manage rapid scaling of work force size and still maintain and increase worker knowledge of increasingly complex mortgage products," said NelsonHall research director Andy Efstathiou, citing another finding. The study also found that risk control and reduction are growing in importance, and mortgage BPO involves little offshoring of services, but offshoring is growing faster than the market as a whole. The company can be found online at http://www.nelson-hall.com.

Class A of SARM Net Interest Margin Notes, series 2005-5, has been placed under review for possible downgrade by Moody's Investors Service.Moody's said the rating action was based on the performance of the Structured Adjustable Rate Mortgage Loan Trust 2005-5. "The transaction has experienced high prepayments, which has adversely affected the NIM by reducing the dollar amount of payments made to the A-IO2 class, which serves as collateral in this NIM transaction," the rating agency said. Moody's noted that NIM deals typically represent the securitization of excess spread, prepayment penalties, and cap payments generated by the underlying residential mortgage-backed securities.

Class B-1 of GE Capital 1998-HE1 has been placed under review for possible downgrade by Moody's Investors Service.Moody's said the rating action was based on credit enhancement levels that are low in view of projected losses. The collateral underlying the transaction consists of closed-end, fixed-rate, first-lien residential mortgage loans. The rating agency can be found online at http://www.moodys.com.

Four classes from three subprime Renaissance Home Equity Loan Trust residential mortgage-backed securities have been downgraded by Fitch Ratings.The downgrades were as follows: series 2002-1, class B, from BBB to BBB-minus (and removed from Rating Watch Negative); series 2002-2, class B, from BBB to BBB-minus; and series 2002-3, class M2, from A to BBB-plus, and class B, from BBB to C (and removed from Rating Watch Negative). In addition, class B of series 2002-3 was assigned a Distressed Recovery rating of DR4, and the ratings on nine other classes from the three transactions were affirmed. Fitch attributed the downgrades to a deterioration in the relationship between credit enhancement and expected losses. Fitch can be found online at http://www.fitchratings.com.

Fitch Ratings has announced the introduction of new model-based stress criteria for securitizations involving the U.S. dollar London interbank offered rate that it says will better capture the potential effects of basis risk.Fitch said it will solicit market feedback for one month before releasing its final criteria, after which the stresses will be updated monthly. The criteria changes are likely to have the biggest effect on consumer asset-backed securities and residential mortgage-backed securities, according to Claire Mezzanotte, a Fitch managing director. Ahmet Kocagil, a managing director in Quantitative Financial Research at Fitch, said the major advantage of the new methodology is that "the basis-risk assumptions are applied uniformly over different securitized products based on past occurrences and future projections of market interest rate dynamics." The rating agency can be found online at http://www.fitchratings.com.

Freddie Mac has announced changes to the eligibility requirements for its real estate mortgage investment conduit program, starting with August settlements.Initial Interest fixed-rate Gold participation certificates with the prefixes H0 (10/20), H1 (15/15), and H2 (10/10) will now be eligible for use as assets in REMIC securities, Freddie Mac said. Freddie will also permit Initial Interest fixed-rate Gold PCs and regularly amortizing fixed-rate Gold PCs with the same coupon and term to be included in the same REMIC group. Freddie Mac said the change is aimed at offering more options for secondary-market execution for the products and, ultimately, providing more competitive rates to mortgage borrowers. The company began offering Initial Interest Gold PCs early last year. The securities are backed by loans that initially have interest-only periods and thereafter are fully amortizing. For example, the prefix H0 (10/20) identifies a 10-year interest-only period followed by a 20-year fully amortizing period.

C&F Financial Corp., West Point, Va., has announced a delay in the reporting of its second-quarter earnings, citing recently uncovered evidence that two former employees of C&F Mortgage Corp. embezzled approximately $2.2 million from the subsidiary.The parent company said its management, general counsel, external and internal auditors, and outside counsel are undertaking "a full and complete investigation" of the matter under the supervision of its audit committee. C&F Financial said it expects to release its financial results for the second quarter within about two weeks. The company can be found online at http://www.cffc.com.