Servicing

Countrywide Financial Corp., Calabasas, Calif., surpassed $700 billion in mortgage servicing rights for the first time in May.At the end of May, Countrywide serviced $707 billion of home loans, up 32% from a year earlier, the company said in its monthly business report. Company president and chief operating officer Stanford Kurland said Countrywide has been adding servicing rights to its books at a pace of $600 million a day since the beginning of this year.

IndyMac Bancorp Inc., Pasadena, Calif., has priced an offering of 3.2 million shares of common stock at $31.75 per share.The gross proceeds of the offering totaled $101.6 million, IndyMac said. The company has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to buy up to 480,000 additional shares to cover any overallotments. Lehman Brothers was the sole book-running manager of the offering, and Morgan Stanley acted as co-manager. IndyMac can be found online at http://www.indymacbank.com.

Aether Systems Inc., Owings Mills, Md., has hired FBR Investment Management Inc. to assist it in assembling and managing a leveraged portfolio of mortgage-backed securities.Aether said the move is "part of an evolving strategy initially designed to increase the yield on its excess cash balances and ultimately representing what could become a more significant business activity for Aether in the future." Aether plans to invest up to $75 million of its current cash and to leverage this amount between five and eight times to assemble an initial portfolio of $450 million to $675 million in value. The company can be found online at http://www.aethersystems.com.

Prepayment rates for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities plunged among major coupons during the May reporting period, according to the Bear Stearns Prepayment Commentary.The constant prepayment rates of Fannie Mae 5.5% coupons fell the most in absolute terms, by as much as 15 CPR, Bear Stearns analysts Dale Westhoff and Bruce Kramer reported. The analysts said the speeds of "moderately seasoned" 5.5s are likely to continue slowing and may drop as much as another 20 CPR by the fall. They also said the slowdown points to important differences in the behavior of agency MBS speeds compared with those of last year. "Clearly, there will be no repeat of last summer's protracted refinancing event that resulted from mortgage pipeline delays," Mr. Westhoff and Mr. Kramer said. Forecasting convergence in agency prepayments, the analysts said the MBS market's refinancing exposure is "the weakest it has been since the fourth quarter of 2000, with less than 25% of the borrower universe having any incentive to refinance at all." Bear Stearns can be found online at http://www.bearstearns.com.

Mortgage lenders added 5,200 full-time employees to their payrolls in April, according to the May employment report released June 4 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.The BLS report shows that jobs in the mortgage banking/broker sector rose from 444,700 in March to 448,900 in April. (There is a one-month lag in BLS's reporting of mortgage sector employment data.) Mortgage rates averaged 5.81% in April and demand for purchase mortgages was at record levels. The June 4 jobs report shows that the economy generated 248,000 new jobs in May and the unemployment rate remained at 5.6%. "Employment in financial activities rose by 15,000 in May, reflecting continued increases in real estate and in credit intermediation," the BLS said. The BLS can be found online at http://stats.bls.gov.

ServiceLink LP, a Pittsburgh-based closing management company, has announced the formation of AssetLink LP as an independent subsidiary to focus on the sale of bank-owned properties acquired through mortgage foreclosures.AssetLink will operate as a community of brokers, lawyers, and other mortgage default service providers managing every level of the real-estate-owned process, ServiceLink said. Ken Westfall, a 25-year veteran of the industry, has been named president of AssetLink. The new company is seeking brokers and attorneys nationwide to provide services from their current locations via an Internet-based platform.

Colonial Savings FA, Fort Worth, Texas, was among 10 companies (not 27) to be inducted into Freddie Mac's Hall of Fame earlier this year for achieving Tier One servicing status four years in a row. There were 27 single-family mortgage servicers that achieved Tier One status from Freddie Mac for superior investor reporting and default management in two or more quarters of 2003.

Class B-4 of Bear Stearns Mortgage Securities Inc. mortgage pass-through certificates, series 1997-6 FRM, has been downgraded from CCC to C by Fitch Ratings.The rating agency also upgraded two classes in the deal and affirmed the ratings on three other classes in the FRM and ARM segments of the transaction. The downgrade was attributed to credit enhancement levels relative to loss expectations. Fitch can be found on the Web at http://www.fitchratings.com.

American Home Mortgage Investment Corp., Melville, N.Y., has begun trading under a new ticker symbol, AHM, on the New York Stock Exchange.The company is a mortgage real estate investment trust that specializes in investing in mortgage-backed securities and, through taxable subsidiaries, originating and servicing mortgage loans for institutional investors. It can be found on the Web at http://www.americanhm.com.

Freddie Mac says it is still working toward releasing its quarterly and annual financial results for 2003 by the end of June."That is our goal," Freddie spokeswoman Sharon McHale said. The giant mortgage company, which is trying to recover from a $5 billion accounting scandal, released a restatement of its 2002 earnings last November. The restatement showed that Freddie's profits totaled $10.1 billion in 2002. The company originally reported a $5.7 profit when it was trying to manage and smooth out its earnings to please Wall Street. Freddie Mac officials have not provided guidance on when the 2004 first-quarter results will be ready for release. The government-sponsored enterprise can be found on the Web at http://www.freddiemac.com.