Origination

The housing finance system must be given back to the companies that make mortgages and the borrowers who use them to buy homes, keynote speakers said at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Secondary Market Conference.

Citing a lack of transparency for both consumers and mortgage professionals, Experience 1 Inc. and its operating units Advantage Title and Title365 have come out with a new online platform Title365.com.

Warehouse club Costco Wholesale started partnering with banks to offer mortgage services online last year, and it wants to get into auto lending and, perhaps, student loans.

HARP 2.0 is hot – or so we keep hearing. Late last year the Treasury Department finally found the keys to the HARP kingdom: take the loan-to-value ratio girdle totally off the patient and see what happens.

Las Vegas-area home sales rose in March to a level not seen in six years.

An American Bankers Association-sponsored mortgage cooperative that sells loans to a select number of investors is looking for new partners.

HSBC Bank USA said that it has inked a deal to transfer roughly $52 billion of residential servicing rights to PHH Corp., which also will absorb two-thirds of its mortgage work force.

A timeline Acting FHFA director Ed DeMarco provided to Congress in March targets September as the date for the first single-family risk-sharing deals. But the question boils down to this: What will Fannie and Freddie come up with and will it be profit-enticing enough for the private sector jump on board?

In the May issue of Origination News, we published our annual ranking of the mortgage industries leading originators by volume. There is also a listing of top originators by units. Christopher Vincent Hussain repeated as the No. 1 originator.