About 30 industry trade groups recently called for Congress to refrain from using GSE guaranty fees as a source of funding for highway programs or any other purposes beyond supporting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The letter, addressed to House Speaker John Boehner, R-OH, as well as leaders Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, Mitch McConnell, R-KY, and Harry Reid, D-NV, aims to prevent the government from tapping g-fees to pay for pet projects. G-fees, used by Fannie and Freddie to protect against losses from loans that default, are a “critical risk management tool,” according to the trade groups who say that increasing g-fees for other purposes imposes an unjustified burden on the housing finance system.

Mortgage banking income rose substantially in the second quarter of 2015 mostly because lenders sold more loans in the secondary market, but the outlook for the second half of the year is murkier. Commercial banks and thrifts sold $198.64 billion of home loans during the second quarter, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data. That was up 19.9 percent from the first three months of the year, and it represented the busiest ... [Includes one data chart]

Officials in the mortgage industry continue to obsess about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s pending integrated disclosure rule, but perhaps they should be paying closer attention to complying with the CFPB’s existing mortgage origination and servicing rules, a top bureau official suggested this week. Speaking at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s 2015 regulatory compliance conference in Washington, DC, Peggy Twohig, assistant director for supervision policy ...

It’s not every day – or every year, for that matter – that a nonbank purchases a federally insured depository. But it happened this month in Arizona. Well, sort of. This month, Kent Wiechert, owner and president of Westar Mortgage, Albuquerque, NM, closed on his purchase of Goldwater Bank, NA, a full-service bank with roughly $100 million in assets. The investment – no purchase price was disclosed – was a personal transaction entered into by Wiechert, but since he controls both ...

Credit standards appear to be easing more than they have in the past few years in both the government-sponsored enterprise market and non-GSE lending, according to Fannie Mae’s most recent lender survey. Medium and large-sized lenders both reported a notable easing of credit standards for the first time in seven quarters. The gap between lenders reporting easing as opposed to tightening over the second quarter increased to 20 percentage points for ...

For investors in mortgage servicing rights, the regulatory focus seems to have shifted somewhat from documentation issues involving servicing transfers to a reliance on subservicers. At the ABS East conference produced by Information Management Network last week in Miami, Michael Drayne, a senior vice president of the office of issuer and portfolio management at Ginnie Mae, said 90 percent of the issuer applicants to Ginnie in the last three years planned to ...

The housing market showed the signs of a typical seasonal slowdown in August, according to results from the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey. While purchase-mortgage lending could soften in the coming months, the home purchase market looks stronger than it was a year ago. Tom Popik, research director of Campbell Surveys, said comments from a number of real estate agents across the country suggest that the housing market ...

Correspondent lenders generated 32.1 percent of the home loans securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae during the second quarter of 2015. More than either other channel, correspondents excelled at finding homebuyer borrowers, 51.9 percent of their second-quarter production, while refinance loans accounted for 56.5 percent of total agency business. Heavy purchase-mortgage volume meant correspondent loans had lower ... [Includes one data chart]

Don’t expect much movement on legislation to reform the GSEs before the 2016 presidential election. Industry analysts suggest that divisions between Democrats and Republicans along with a housing finance system that is functioning well enough will continue to combine to prevent enactment of GSE reform for some time. At the ABS East conference sponsored by Information Management Network last week in Miami, a variety of industry participants seemed resigned to the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will remain under the conservatorship of the Federal Housing Finance Agency for years to come. James Lockhart, vice chairman of WL Ross & Co. and a former director of the FHFA, said the enactment of GSE reform...(Chart, GSE Activity by State)

As energy efficiency plays a growing role in real estate and mortgage credit, Freddie Mac decided to up the ante in its multifamily business and offer a $5,000 green rebate to borrowers. Qualified borrowers with at least 20 units who voluntarily provide an Energy Star score when submitting their loan documents, are eligible. Freddie said it hopes to encourage energy efficiency and affordability in apartment properties and strengthen the market for green investments. Freddie also said rental housing is home to many of the country’s lower-income households who are struggling with housing costs such as rent and utilities. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the average commercial building wastes 30 percent of the energy it consumes, often resulting in higher operating costs.