Servicing

Employees at the office work with U.S. residents who were behind on their home loan payments. In an emailed statement, Wells Fargo & Co. said Wednesday that as the economy has improved over the last two years, fewer customers have become delinquent on their payments, and fewer customers have needed assistance to stay in their homes. The company says it will continue to offer assistance to borrowers facing financial hardship.

The downgrade comes after Ocwen Financial announced they would be selling $9.6 billion worth of servicing rights to Green Tree. Fitch said the downgrade is tied to Green Tree having had aggressive portfolio growth in the past two years in a press release.

This will be the second time in as many months that Ocwen has announced an MSR sale on an Agency portfolio of residential loans to Dallas, Texas-based Nationstar. In February, Ocwen announced its intention to sell the MSR on a portfolio of about 81,000 performing residential loans owned by Freddie Mac with a UPB of about $9.8 billion to Nationstar. Combined, the two MSR deals between Ocwen and Nationstar announced in the last two months include about 223,00 Agency residential mortgage loans with $34.8 billion in UPB.

In January, a group of Residential Mortgage Backed Securities (RMBS) investors including BlackRock Financial Management Inc., Pacific Investment Management Company LLC, Kore Advisors, and Metropolitan Life Insurance issued a notice on Ocwen’s alleged non-performance. Ocwen claims the notice is a part of a long campaign by the RMBS investors to force more home foreclosures and less loan modifications.

More than 2,200 homeowners who had mortgages with SunTrust and lost their homes to foreclosure in the past few years are eligible to a cash settlement worked out by the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office. North Carolina’s portion of the payout is about $21.5 million. Claim forms were mailed this week, and homeowners have until June 4 to submit a claim. The average payment will be around $850, according to Attorney General Roy Cooper.

According to Ocwen, the portfolio consists of approximately 55,000 performing loans owned by Freddie Mac. The transaction is subject to approval by Freddie Mac and its conservator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), as well as other customary conditions. Ocwen reported that it expects the transaction to close by April 30, 2015, and expects the loan servicing to transfer in May 2015.

In an update on its website dated March 2, Ocwen announced that it had "signed a letter of intent with a buyer on the sale of mortgage servicing rights (MSRs) on a portfolio consisting of approximately 277,000 performing Agency loans owned by Fannie Mae with a total unpaid principal balance of approximately $45 billion."

At the start of a trial in Manhattan federal court, a lawyer for the Federal Housing Finance Agency said misrepresentations by Nomura and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, an underwriter, about loans underlying $2 billion (1.3 billion pounds) in securities exemplified broader misconduct by banks ahead of the crash.

The “Appraisal Findings Report,” which is available through Message Manager, will be updated in April to include the CU feedback. The report, which is available to Fannie Mae sellers and services, covers appraisals submitted to the UCPD in the prior month and is generally available on the fifth business day of each month. The new report will replace three separate reports Fannie Mae currently provides by combining that information into one file.

The bill includes a report provision, which will delay the implementation of the NCUA’s proposed risk-based capital regulation as it relates to mortgage servicing assets until an impact study is conducted. The NAFCU says this will promote transparency, require a thorough analysis of the proposal’s impact on mortgage servicing assets, and encourage the NCUA to take more time to consider the full impact of its proposed capital rule.