Deterioration in income derived from mortgage servicing rights kept home loan servicers in the red during the first three months of this year.
Based solely on servicers that participated in both the current and prior-quarter surveys, the average servicing portfolio was 80,988 loans for $13.721 billion in the first quarter.
Servicing portfolios inched up from an average of 80,953 loans for $13.681 billion as of the fourth-quarter 2014 and expanded from 68,457 loans for $11.347 billion as of the first-quarter of last year.
The Mortgage Bankers Association reported the data in its Quarterly Mortgage Bankers Performance Report Q1 2015. For the latest period, responses from 236 servicers were analyzed for the study.
Average loans serviced per full-time employee jumped to 1,286 loans in the first-quarter 2015 from the prior period’s 1,049.
The average was also up from 1,185 per full-time employee in the year-earlier period.
Residential loan servicers lost an average of three BPS on loans serviced during the first three months of this year.
Income deteriorated from the less than one-basis-point loss experienced in the final three months of last year and swung from an 11-basis-point profit in the first three months of last year.
The deterioration between the fourth-quarter 2014 and the first-quarter 2015 was the result of losses on MSRs, which went from a 13-basis-point loss to a 17-basis-point loss in the most-recent period.
Net servicing income was a seven-basis-point loss at companies with servicing portfolios of between 10,000 and 50,000 loans. But at companies with portfolios of between 2,500 and 10,000 loans , there was a three-basis-point profit.
