Mick Mulvaney, acting director of the consumer bureau created under the Dodd-Frank Act, is serious about changing the agency’s name to “correct” its designation from the CFPB to the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection. Since its creation during the Obama administration, the agency has been branded as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the CFPB. Mulvaney said its title in the Dodd-Frank Act is the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, or BCFP ...

Altisource Portfolio Solutions disclosed that the CFPB won’t take any enforcement action against the company regarding its relationship with Ocwen Financial Corp., which was sued by the bureau for mortgage misconduct last year. The vendor – started years ago by Ocwen and then spun off – revealed last week that it received a letter from the CFPB on April 3 that the bureau has completed the investigation of the service provider and is currently not recommending any enforcement ...

Industry trade groups suggested numerous changes to the CFPB’s civil investigation processes aimed at reducing burdens for financial institutions and ending the bureau’s “regulation by enforcement.” The civil investigative demand is a measure used by the bureau’s Office of Enforcement to gather information from entities against which the bureau may take enforcement action. Trade groups representing those regulated entities suggested changes on every single element of the ...

Consumer complaints to the CFPB related to mortgages are down sharply from a year ago, with huge declines in every major category, according to a new Inside the CFPB analysis. Total gripes filed during the first quarter of 2018 were down 36.3 percent from a year ago, although the volume was up slightly – 2.5 percent – from the fourth quarter of 2017. Among specific kinds of mortgage complaints, criticisms about loan modifications dropped both annually and quarterly... [Includes one data chart]

Mick Mulvaney Wants to Hide Consumer Complaints from Public View. Acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney said last week that he wants to shut down public access to the CFPB’s consumer complaint database. “I don’t see anything in here that says I have to have a Yelp run by the federal government,” he said at an American Bankers Association event. Consumer Groups Say the Wells Fargo $1 Billion Fine a Flawed Settlement. The CFPB recently has fined [Includes two briefs] ...

Nonbanks continued to gain ground in the GSE servicing market during the first quarter of 2018 despite some significant declines at several top companies. Nonbanks serviced $1.750 trillion of single-family loans tied to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities as of the end of March, a new Inside The GSEs analysis reveals. That was up 1.8 percent from December and a stunning 15.7 percent from March 2017. The nonbank share of GSE servicing edged up to 37.5 percent. Depository institutions – banks, thrifts and credit unions – saw a modest gain in aggregate GSE servicing during the first three months of 2018, but their combined market share fell to 58.7 percent.

Sen. Mike Crapo, R-ID, chair of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, isn’t giving up on housing-finance reform in 2018, even though many industry observers already have. He said it’s still a “high priority,” while speaking at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Advocacy conference in Washington this week. Crapo disagreed with comments made earlier in the day by Housing and Urban Development Deputy Secretary Pam Patenaude, who said there aren’t enough legislative days left to do GSE reform this go around. And he was adamant in saying he’s not ruling out the possibility of reform happening in this Congress.

Freddie Mac introduced a new conventional 3 percent downpayment program that is open to a wider range of borrowers with no income restrictions or limitations as to where the borrower lives. The new mortgage product, HomeOne, was created to allow lenders flexibility when it comes to helping borrowers anywhere in the country become homeowners and overcome the common hurdle of a lack of downpayment resources, said Danny Gardner, Freddie’s senior vice president of single-family affordable lending and access to credit. He said HomeOne is great for potential borrowers looking to...

Pershing Square Holdings, one of the largest institutional investors in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac common stock, is doubling down on its investment in the two mortgage giants. But it’s taking a different tack, buying up junior preferred stock rather than increasing its holdings of common. The change in strategy was mentioned in the firm’s annual report to shareholders and comes at a time when the chances of housing-finance reform look nil for 2018. How much PSH paid for the junior preferred is unknown. According to the annual report, “Our preferred stock represents approximately 21 percent of our total investment in Fannie and Freddie, or about 1 percent of net assets.”

Automated appraisals may be less biased and give more accurate property value estimates, according to a new working paper by the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s Office of Policy Analysis and Research. This is especially true in rural areas where there are fewer comparable stats and more heterogeneity across homes, said the authors, Alexander Bogin and Jessica Shui. In fact, the data suggest that more than 25 percent of rural appraisals exceed the associated contract price by more than 5 percent. The study was based on GSE loan acquisitions from 2012 to 2016.Moreover, given the bias found in appraisals, some researchers have considered including automated...