Tag Archives: Fitch Ratings

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.

In a note to stakeholders released Thursday, Faris reviewed a handful of the regulatory hurdles Ocwen has had to deal with in the past year, including a long-running investigation from New York's top financial regulator that eventually resulted in a $150 million settlement.

With 2015 less than two weeks underway, Fitch Ratings is the latest forecaster predicting great things for housing in the coming year. However, unlike other commentators, whose projections were based on encouraging market trends, the ratings agency says it's a combination of recent government actions that reinforces its view.

In its latest look at the RMBS segment, Fitch says that while the market still has some rebuilding left to do, it "has seen some rather substantial improvements of late," owing in large part to improved loan underwriting standards in recent years. According to the company, the performance of recent vintage mortgage loans is the best on record so far.

Looking at the year ahead, Fitch predicts a bounce in both supply and demand for homes as the economy continues to steadily expand and both employment measures and consumer confidence see improvement. With housing starts and new home sales expected to advance, Fitch sees a possibility of higher revenues for homebuilders.

As the rest of the housing market struggled in the year's first half, so too did the title insurance industry, Fitch Ratings reported in a new analysis. Isolating business at the nation's four largest title insurers, analysts at Fitch calculated a combined 12 percent decline in operating revenues through the first six months of 2014 compared to the same period last year.

In its newest monthly prime jumbo trends report, Fitch Ratings finds weighted average combined loan-to-value ratios for residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) deals made in the last few have fallen substantially, fueled by ongoing gains in house prices. Together, the improvement in equity positions combined with stronger borrower credit profiles has helped keep delinquency down, Fitch reports.

In a release, Fitch Ratings announced it is changing Green Tree's servicer grades to "Rating Watch Negative," citing "ongoing concerns with Green Tree's rapid growth and portfolio integration" as well as the results of the latest compliance update from the Office of the Mortgage Settlement Oversight (OSMO), which showed the servicer failed to meet some of the minimum requirements agreed to by some of the nation’s biggest outfits.

The continued—and oddly sluggish—recovery cycle the U.S is currently experiencing in not, according to a new report by Fitch Ratings and Oxford Analytica, on course to run the typical peaks-and-valleys cycle of the five major economic expansion periods the U.S. has experienced since the early 1970s.

Standard & Poor’s (S&P) may have made some missteps in evaluating the risk of a residential mortgage-backed security (RMBS) transaction that has now been postponed, Fitch Ratings says in a recent report. In a release issued Friday, Fitch says S&P relied on incomplete home value data for loans contained in the recently announced RMBS transaction to be issued by Bayview Asset Management.