dhollier@imfpubs.com

In its annual housing report for 2025, released last week, the Federal Housing Finance Agency found that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac complied with their duty-to-serve plans for all three of the required underserved markets. A closer look at their performance, though, reveals some shortcomings.

Fannie received high satisfactory ratings for its activities in manufactured housing and affordable housing preservation, but a low satisfactory rating in the rural housing market category. However, Fannie came up short of its own target for all objectives in the manufactured homes market, including achieving just 65% of its goal to have 2% of its total acquisitions be for manufactured housing communities with pad lease protections.

Fannie was also below target on three of its four rural housing objectives, although both enterprises far exceeded their targets for investments in low income housing tax credit for rural housing.

Freddie came up just short of its targets for purchasing loans for manufactured homes titled as real property and for rural housing in high-needs regions. It was a little further off the mark (69%) for buying rural housing loans from small financial institutions.

FHFA also indicated a preliminary finding of “patterns of disparities” in the interest rates charged to minority borrowers in 2024, and said that these have been referred to “the appropriate regulatory and enforcement agencies.” The report didn’t say which enterprise this finding referred to or what those disparities were.