Company: RWT-PA
Filing Date: 2025-03-03
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000930236-25-000007
Chunk: 295

Company: REDWOOD TRUST INC
Filing Date: 2025-03-03
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 7
Chunk 295
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 share for both of our operating platforms, while continuing to make accretive investments, sourced both organically and from third parties. 

Within our Sequoia platform, we emphasized deepening and continuing to build relationships with our loan seller network, including both banks and independent mortgage banks ("IMBs"). Our thesis remains that banks will need balance sheet solutions for their on-the-run and legacy residential jumbo mortgage loan portfolios. From 2020 to 2023, bank holdings of jumbo loans increased 33%, yet a number of factors make holding these loans on balance sheet less attractive for banks, including capital treatment, funding mismatches and reduced net interest margin due to higher funding costs. Consistent with our focus on bank relationships, we remain focused on positioning ourselves to transact in large pools of mortgage loans emerging from the banking sector, which we believe has accelerated in early 2025. For example, in January 2025, three large regional banks spurred nearly $10 billion of seasoned mortgage pools to change hands, a trend that we currently expect will continue throughout 2025 with the potential for our existing bank relationships to evolve into more sizable bulk flow purchase opportunities for jumbo mortgage loans.

Given this dynamic, in 2024 we were actively engaged in both onboarding new loan sellers and strengthening relationships with existing ones. By the end of the year, more than half of our loan seller network consisted of banks. As these sellers transitioned to working with us, we had the opportunity to showcase our expertise, fast closing times, tailored product solutions, and seamless execution. This led to increased volume, a larger market share, and heightened distribution activity. We locked $8.95 billion of loans in 2024, supported by a combination of bulk (39%) and flow volume (61%). As evidence of our strengthening engagement with our bank and IMB relationships, quarterly flow volume in the fourth quarter of 2024 rose to its highest level since early 2022. Bulk activity also benefited from deepening relationships with our seller network, including the purchase of a $0.4 billion pool of seasoned hybrid adjustable-rate mortgage loans (“ARMs”) in the second half of 2024 from a large bank that we subsequently securitized later in the year. Consistent with this theme, in mid-February 2025, we executed a trade with a large money-center bank to acquire a pool of approximately $1 billion of jumbo and agency fixed and adjustable-rate loans, which we expect to settle early in the second quarter of 202