Fannie Mae is testing the market for single-family rental homes by backing a large institutional investor for the first time. In an agreement to fund up to $1 billion of collateral owned by Invitation Homes, Fannie, along with Wells Fargo Bank, issued a commitment letter to the Dallas-based company. Invitation, a subsidiary of Blackstone, is the largest single-family rental operation, with a portfolio of close to 50,000 homes that it acquired from foreclosure auctions to fix up and rent.The commitment states that the GSE will be involved in a “securitization transaction” with the SFR operator “to fund a new 10-year fixed rate mortgage loan in a...
A federal court ruled that GSE shareholders can no longer sue Fannie Mae’s accounting firm, Deloitte & Touche, and that the Federal Housing Finance Agency will take over as plaintiff in the Edwards et al v. Deloitte & Touche case. The ruling, handed down last week in the U.S. District Court of Florida, distanced shareholders from the case, and said any claims against Deloitte are the sole responsibility of ...
Freddie Mac recommends that lenders begin preparing now for the Uniform Closing Dataset mandate that takes effect on Sept. 25, 2017. The Federal Housing Finance Agency directed Fannie Mae and Freddie to provide a common industry dataset to support the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s closing disclosure. As a result, the pair developed the UCD to make sure the disclosures were accurate and to facilitate sharing of the data. Andy Higginbotham, Freddie’s senior vice president of ...
The Federal Housing Finance Agency is taking steps to explore financing personal property loans for manufactured housing and is seeking input on initiating a pilot program. Manufactured housing advocates have been pushing for greater support from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, especially in the form of establishing a secondary market for chattel lending, in which the home is not permanently affixed to the real estate and titled as personal property. The Manufactured Housing Institute has been in talks for some time with the GSEs and FHFA, making the case that chattel loan performance demonstrates that the GSEs can purchase chattel lending safely and profitably.
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled last week that Fannie Mae does not have the right to automatically transfer a case from state court to federal court under the “sue-and-be-sued” clause. In the ruling from the Lightfoot v. Cendant Mortgage Corp. case, the court rejected an argument stating that the GSE’s federal charter creates federal jurisdiction. The case was argued in November. The ruling by Justice Sonia Sotomayor reversed an earlier Ninth Circuit Court decision which stated that Fannie’s sue-and-be-sued clause in the charter enabled it to transfer state-filed lawsuits against it to federal court. But that’s not the case anymore. “Fannie Mae’s sue-and-be-sued clause is most naturally read not to grant...
With the Trump administration now officially in office, GSE shareholders are optimistic about their cases against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being resolved. Investors Unite hosted a call last week during which legal experts weighed in on the outlook for GSE shareholder cases. Plaintiffs have been arguing that a government bailout of the GSEs and the subsequent Treasury sweep were unnecessary and illegal. John Yoo, Heller Professor of Law at the University of California Berkley School of Law, said he thinks the election makes a big difference because it gives an incoming president the opportunity to review the constitutional claims of the last president and decide whether to change them.
Marking one of the first major GSE changes of the new year, Fannie Mae’s new investor reporting requirement goes into effect next week on Feb. 1. Fannie said that servicers must use the updated transaction types and formats when reporting loan activity for the February 2017 reporting period. To minimize challenges during the transition, Fannie announced a temporary moratorium on post-delivery servicing transfers with effective dates from Feb.1, 2017, through March 31, 2017. …
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