Rundown and Recap: The Mortgage Banker Association’s 2014 Annual Convention & Expo

This year's Mortgage Banker Association's 2014 Annual Convention & Expo was held in beautiful and exciting Las Vegas. After a full week of conferences, networking, and talking to industry experts, we are here to give you a recap of the key points you missed. 

Observations from this year’s conference:

Curtis Knuth, Executive Vice President

“It’s going to be a slow recovery,” is the reality many at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Annual Conference stated.  They’re interested in what tools/strategies they need to continue growth and what regulations are here to stay.  Here’s a snippet of several of our conversations during the show.

RESPA/TILA is obviously a concern to many.  Mortgage Brokers venturing into becoming “mini-Correspondents” is still very hot for Warehouse Lenders and the CFPB alike.  Industry consolidation is occurring at a rapid pace, and many vendors are joining the act, for instance our friends at e-Sign Systems and DocMagic coming together.

Easier methods for calculating income remained a hot topic and was one of the solutions we continued to spotlight at the show.

Other discussions surrounded PMI entities and the GSE’s 2014 requirements that PMIs may rescind a policy only for GSE approved reasons.  There is a specific time frame that the rescission may occur (outside of mortgage fraud, which enables a PMI to rescind the policy at any time) and what “rescission relief” there would be seller/servicers.  Additionally, the updated requirements from the GSEs are expected to improve communication with the seller/servicer and communication with troubled borrowers in loss mitigation programs.  PMIs have rewritten their Master Policies and submitted them to individual states for approval.  Most if not all are now in effect.

Lenders are still lamenting the lack of, and financing barriers to first time homebuyers; but were optimistic by FHFA’s commissioner Mel Watt’s comments during the show.  His prepared remarks are available here on FHFA’s website.

All, in all, it was a good conference for NCS and we hope it was mutually as useful and informative to our many friends and colleagues that we really enjoyed seeing again.  We’ll see you all in San Diego at next year’s Annual!

NCS will be in attendance for the 2015 conference and expo. 

We hope to see you there!