Origination

If you’re looking for a patch of brightness in the national job numbers that came out Friday morning look at the mortgage brokerage employment line: broker firms added 2,300 loan officers and other staffers to their payrolls in April.

The Government National Mortgage Association approved 35 issuer licenses last year and hopes to approve about the same this year, according to agency president Ted Tozer.

Is the Government National Mortgage Association actually making progress in clearing its backlog of issuer applications? Answer: It all depends on who you ask.

Fannie Mae bought just $52 billion of home mortgages from its seller/servicers in April, a 45% plunge from March, according to new figures released by the GSE. Freddie Mac bought $26 billion of loans, a 39% decline from March.

Employment in the residential finance sector fell to 266,100 full-time positions in April from 267,600 in March, a difference of about 1,500 jobs.

Abacus Federal Savings Bank and more than a dozen of its former employees are facing criminal charges related to a scheme in which it allegedly falsified information on mortgage applications so that unqualified borrowers could secure loans.

Newly initiated foreclosures by the Federal Housing Administration jumped 247% in April from a year earlier, while the overall number of foreclosure starts fell 3.1% in the same period.

Ellie Mae’s stock will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock has traded on the NYSE-owned American Stock Exchange since the Pleasanton, Calif.-based mortgage technology vendor’s $45 million initial public offering in April 2011.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau served official notice that it is seeking comment on a range of issues—including the cost of potential litigation—and whether debt-to-income ratios should be used to determine a borrower’s “ability to repay” a residential loan.

Deloitte says that assets controlled by the shadow banking system—including asset- and mortgage-backed securities—have declined by more than 50% in the last four years, to $9.53 trillion at Dec. 31.