The House passed a bill last week that would allow privately-insured credit unions to apply for membership in the Federal Home Loan Bank System. H.R. 299, the Capital Access for Small Community Financial Institutions Act of 2015, was introduced by Reps. Joyce Beatty, D-OH, and Steve Stivers, R-OH, in January. Credit unions did not have federal insurance until 1970, and Stivers said that many small institutions decided to remain privately-insured and state regulated. While the number is small compared to the more than 6,000 credit unions in the country, the approximately 130 privately-insured credit unions spread out in nine states don’t meet the FHLB System guidelines. Stivers said that a “legislative oversight” has blocked FHLB membership for this small...
Freddie Mac Single-Family Update. On April 15, Freddie updated several servicing requirements, adding a new modification option in Workout Prospector for modifying Rural Housing Service mortgages. Also, in Bulletin 2015-5, Freddie announced a new credit-risk transfer initiative that involves the GSE purchasing mortgages from certain seller/servicers and transferring them to one or more senior subordinate trusts.Fannie Mae Closes First Multifamily Green Building Certification Price Break Loan. Fannie announced that the first loan to close with its Multifamily Green Building Certification Pricing Break is a 50-unit rental property in NJ. The April 21 announcement stated that the Station House was acquired by Prudential Real Estate Investors and has a U.S. Green Building Council LEED certification. As a result of the reduction in...
The Federal Housing Finance Agency late last week directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to stop charging the 25 basis point “adverse market” fee assessed on all loans since the financial crises, but most lower-risk loans won’t get any reduction in loan-level pricing adjustments. As expected, the FHFA did not make any changes to the “base” guaranty fees charged by the two government-sponsored enterprises. Current fees, on average, are at an “appropriate” level. “We are going to monitor this on an ongoing or quarterly basis and we’ll adjust based on market conditions,” said Sandra Thompson, FHFA’s deputy director. The regulator instructed...
Quicken Loans this week went where no lender in the mortgage industry has gone before: Suing the U.S. government for suggesting it’s been doing a crappy job of originating FHA loans. Its legal action not only caught most of the industry by surprise, but resulted in loud applause from the Mortgage Bankers Association and K&L Gates partner Larry Platt. A number of major lenders have paid...
The Federal Housing Finance Agency late last week announced a few changes to new private mortgage insurer eligibility rules that were first proposed in July 2014, and the private MI industry appears mostly ready for them. “The new PMIERs are really designed to promote the counterparty strength of private mortgage insurers. We feel like this will strengthen the industry,” said Gina Haly, Freddie Mac’s vice president in the mortgage insurance and risk transfer counterparty credit division. During the financial crisis, some MIs couldn’t fully pay...
The agency mortgage servicing market grew modestly during the first quarter of 2015, thanks to Ginnie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of agency mortgage-backed securities disclosures. Lenders serviced a total of $5.287 trillion of single-family mortgages pooled in outstanding agency MBS as of the end of March, up 0.1 percent from the fourth quarter of 2014. The figures do not include unsecuritized loans guaranteed by the two government-sponsored enterprises or, in the case of Ginnie, FHA-insured reverse mortgages. And the numbers don’t perfectly synch up with aggregated reports by the agencies of their guaranteed mortgage debt outstanding. All three of the top agency MBS servicers had...[Includes two data charts]
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