Securitization

A consortium including GPP and TIAA has obtained a $500 million mortgage on a 672,581- square-foot portion of the 2.7-million-square foot Ala Moana Center in Honolulu.

The trial of a former Cantor Fitzgerald mortgage-backed securities trader charged with lying to his clients turned contentious as his lawyer aggressively questioned one of his alleged victims about methods his firm uses to invest.

The $826.6 million transaction, GPMT 2018-1, represents about two-fifths of the $2.4 billion portfolio of the REIT, which was spun out of Two Harbors Investment last year.

Former Cantor Fitzgerald managing director David Demos is on trial, accused of deceiving clients about the prices his firm could sell or pay for mortgage-backed securities.

The real estate investment trust is issuing $450 million of five-year notes backed by rights to excess servicing strips of Fannie Mae loans.

The 860 loans backing its latest transaction, the $258.4 million Verus Securitization Trust, 2018-INV1, are all "business purpose investor loans,” according to S&P.

A large portion of the collateral for the $1.06 billion IH-2018-SFR1 is being rolled over from two transactions originally issued in 2015.

A class action filed last week alleges that Renovate America and Renew Financial failed to provide consumer protections promised to L.A. County, that this constitutes elder abuse, and the county is complicit.

HELOCs make up just 2.9% of the $281 million pool of collateral; 81.8% of the HELOC borrowers are currently ineligible to make draws; another 18.2% are permanently frozen.

The increase in the delinquency rate for securitized CRE loans for March ended an eight-month streak of declines.

The investigation targeted 36 residential mortgage-backed securities deals involving $31 billion worth of loans, more than half of which defaulted, according to the Justice Department.

Lenders should not get so desperate chasing volume by originating lower credit non-qualified mortgage products that they are inviting the next regulatory crackdown, said David Stevens, the Mortgage Bankers Association's CEO.

After several years of preparation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will start issuing a new, common mortgage-backed security starting June 3, 2019, the Federal Housing Finance Agency said Wednesday.

The non-bank lender's $299.8 million prime, high-balance deal is no surprise; it follows a warehouse securitization last year. Angel Oak is also in the market with a $238.8 million deal.

Banks would welcome a proposal to loosen Basel III capital restrictions because it would make holding mortgage servicing rights easier and stem the recent exodus of depositories from the servicing business, executives said.

UBS agreed to pay $230 million to resolve a New York state probe into the Swiss bank's marketing and sales of residential mortgage-backed securities before the financial crisis, boosting the state's recoveries in the investigation to almost $4 billion.

Issuance of Ginnie Mae securities backed by reverse mortgages rose above $1 billion for the second time in two years, according to the government agency's latest monthly report.

Nonbanks are originating more commercial mortgages on fixer-uppers in response to a sharp drop in the cost of funding in the securitization market. These deals are said to be "vastly different" than other CRE instruments that sustained big losses in the crisis — so far.

First the House and now the Senate have included provisions in their regulatory relief bills that bankers say would go a long way toward clearing up confusion over how to treat high-volatility commercial real estate loans.

Just one year after it got a $1.05 billion loan from a trio of banks (Goldman, BofA and Citi), Blackstone has obtained a new, $1.3 billion loan from two more banks: Barclays and Deutsche.