The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. have announced offerings of multiple residential reverse mortgage pools for sale to investors. The HUD pools are comprised of approximately 650 reverse mortgage notes with a total loan balance of about $136 million. The sale consists of due and payable first-lien reverse mortgages secured by single-family, vacant residential properties where all borrowers are deceased and none is survived by a non-borrowing spouse. The reverse-mortgage sale is the third offering of its type. As with past offerings, the sale will be by competitive bidding on April 11, 2018. The loans will be sold without FHA insurance and with servicing released. The loans are expected to be offered in regional pools. Meanwhile, the FDIC will unload in open auction 3,280 FHA-insured reverse-mortgage loans from the ...
Realtors and fair-lending advocates are outraged over reports that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has ordered the removal of language ensuring “inclusiveness and discrimination-free communities” from the department’s mission statement. A spokesperson for HUD denied the report, blaming it on faulty reporting by the Huffington Post on March 6. Carson later followed up with his own denial in an open letter to HUD employees, which the department made public. The initial press report cited a March 5 memo written by Amy Thompson, assistant secretary for public affairs, and addressed to HUD political staff. In the memo, Thompson talked about ongoing efforts to update the mission statement to align HUD’s mission with the Trump administration’s priorities. She added that Carson helped in the development of the new statement as well as urged senior staff to ...
Accounting firm Deloitte & Touche has agreed to pay the federal government $149.5 million to settle False Claims Act liabilities arising from its audits of failed FHA lender Taylor, Bean &Whitaker Mortgage Corp.Deloitte was TBW’s independent outside auditor from 2002 through 2008, when the subprime mortgage market unraveled, triggering a financial and housing crisis. The Department of Justice alleged that, during the period in question, TBW had been running a fraudulent scheme involving the purported sale of fictitious or double-pledged mortgages. According to court documents, Lee Bentley Farkas, former chairman of TBW, and six other banking executives engaged in a more than $2.9 billion fraud scheme that contributed to the failures of Colonial Bank and TBW. Farkas and his crew allegedly misappropriated in excess of $1.4 billion from Colonial Bank’s warehouse lending division in Orlando, FL, and approximately $1.5 billion from Ocala Funding, a mortgage-lending facility controlled by TBW.
The reverse-mortgage industry is in an uncomfortable place in the first quarter of 2018 due to lower volumes, higher costs and lower margins – the same issues that ail the traditional forward-lending business currently, says a new analysis by the Stratmor Group. Applications and counseling requests are down more than expected for this time of the year despite the recent rule changes implemented by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to ensure the long-term viability of the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage program. Stratmor projects HECM volume at $1.6 billion in 2018, down from approximately $2.0 billion in 2017, due mainly to dwindling refinances. “Given the reduction in the interest-rate floor, it is reasonable to expect that gain-on-sale margins will decline, but just how far, who knows,” said Jim Cameron, a senior partner at Stratmor. “The reduction in unit ...
The Department of Veterans Affairs has issued new guidance on a number of topics, including foreclosure relief in disaster areas, property management and servicing, lender’s payment or credit of veterans’ costs, acceptance of properties, redemption procedures, and reconveyance disputes. VA has extended the moratorium on foreclosures in areas that suffered the brunt of hurricanes Harvey, Maria and Irma from 180 days to 270 days to give more time for distressed homeowners with a VA mortgage to recover their financial footing. VA also extended the rescission date of guidance regarding its reconveyance dispute process and servicer statutory redemption procedures from Jan. 1, 2018, to Oct. 1, 2020. VA issued additional servicing guidance on real estate-owned properties and direct loan portfolio (VA’s national portfolio), which is currently serviced by ...
Ginnie Mae this week urged issuers to ensure that electronic protections against unauthorized automated payments from accounts do not impede the agency’s ability to draft funds from issuers’ accounts to pay investors. In a letter to stakeholders, Ginnie cautioned issuers to make certain that the ACH debit blocks they have in place would not hinder the agency from accessing funds in the central principal-and-interest custodial accounts on the 15th and 20th of each month. ACH debit blocks help prevent fraud by barring unauthorized payments from accounts and allowing companies to designate a specific person to post electronic debits to the payee’s account In addition, Ginnie asked issuers to implement a process of checking whether funds have been drawn at 7 a.m. EST on each 15th and 20th day of the month. “It is critical that each issuer also have in place a process for ...
The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s nonpayment orders were effective in preventing payment of improper claims on FHA loans, according to the department’s inspector general. The HUD IG said a review of 17 claims with an active nonpayment order and 10 claims that had no such order show no improper claims that were paid. The IG conducted its audit from October to December 2017, focusing on FHA loans that had a nonpayment order and a claim paid from Jan. 1, 2013, to Aug. 31, 2017. Of the 97 loans identified and targeted by IG auditors, 17 were picked as a non-statistical sample based on whether an inactive nonpayment order was entered on the same date as the active nonpayment order, comments entered for the nonpayment order, and the claim-payment amounts. The IG also picked 65 loans that had a claim paid after an inactive nonpayment order was created with an ...
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