News that the Federal Housing Administration mutual mortgage insurance fund is short more than $13 billion could turn out to be a boon for specialty servicers. The FHA is now considering a transfer of mortgage servicing rights, analysts noted Monday.
Researchers with Compass Point Research & Trading said the FHA actuarial report creates a case to transfer mortgage servicing rights tied from their current servicers to specialty servicers.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General Report made a similar push for FHA MSR transfers.
About 9.6% of the FHA’s $1.1 trillion single-family loan portfolio is seriously delinquent. Many of the extremely late mortgages are tied to the 2006, 2007, 2008 loan vintages, according to Compass Point data.
This automatically raises concerns about the quality of the servicing, an issue that the FHA report clearly raises, Compass Point said. More expert handlers of these types of loans are needed, the researchers conclude.
The FHA even indicates in its report that more effective loss mitigation could be created by transferring servicing rights to special servicers, forcing a sub-servicing agreement on loans that are issues and requiring servicers to use third-party contractors to assist with loss mitigation.
