Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both have initiatives that link homebuyer education counselors to their automated underwriting tools to better determine a buyer’s homeownership readiness. The Federal Housing Finance Agency this week released its 2017 Scorecard Progress Report detailing work on strategic goals for the duo. Under the goal of maintaining credit access, the FHFA said the GSEs have been exploring ways to improve the effectiveness of pre-purchase and early delinquency counseling.Last month, Fannie, the Housing Partnership Network and other housing counseling agencies announced plans to develop a new client case management system. This system will connect Fannie’s automated underwriting products, Desktop Originator and Desktop Underwriter, to housing counseling agencies.
The GSE reform draft expected from Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, likely won’t see the light of day until sometime in mid-April, according to industry lobbyists and trade officials tracking its progress.Meanwhile, it’s safe to say some degree of apathy is setting in for the simple reason that even if a draft appears, few believe it will be bipartisan in nature, which means it will never become law, at least not in this Congress. “No one cares,” said one senior trade group official who spoke under the condition he not be identified.This official said his focus is now squarely on regulatory relief and reforming certain aspects of the...
There was a significant increase in deliveries to the GSEs of home loans with high debt-to-income ratios during the second half of 2017, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac single-family mortgage-backed securities.The two GSEs securitized $52.90 billion of mortgages with DTI ratios ranging from 46 percent to 50 percent over the last six months of the year. That was up 72.6 percent from the first half of 2017, and the annual total was up 37.6 percent from 2016.
Newfi Lending has rolled out a new non-agency jumbo loan program for its wholesale mortgage broker partners aimed at high-asset borrowers who are difficult to qualify. The program, Sequoia Portfolio Plus, is designed as a go-to alternative for creditworthy borrowers who could not qualify for conventional jumbo loans due to a less-than-stellar credit history. Sequoia combines the best of jumbo and nontraditional borrowing options, explained Newfi CEO Steve Abreu ...
Adopting a digital origination process can help lenders win market share, according to analysts at Strategic Mortgage Finance Group. Michael Grad, a senior partner at Stratmor, stressed that it takes more than upgrading a loan origination system to see results. “As an industry, we’ve approached digital originations by allowing technology to drive business instead of setting business strategy that drives our technology choices,” he said in a recent analysis. “Our industry needs to ...
Lenders and potential borrowers are reporting relatively weak demand for purchase mortgages heading into the spring homebuying season. While consumers are seeing economic gains, rising home prices and higher interest rates have constrained expectations for home sales. Doug Duncan, senior vice president and chief economist at Fannie Mae, said lenders surveyed in the first quarter by the GSE reported “the most anemic” purchase-mortgage demand outlook for any first quarter since ...
The first quarter of 2018 comes to a close on Sunday, with many conventional lenders happy to see it end, but that doesn’t mean the origination downturn – courtesy of higher rates – was a horror show by any means. Certain shops posted modest production declines compared to the fourth quarter of 2017 and several increased lending compared to 1Q17, according to interviews conducted by Inside Mortgage Trends. But perhaps the biggest shot in the arm came from ...
Banks and savings institutions reported $2.98 billion of mortgage repurchases or other indemnifications in 2017, a 6.6 percent decline from the previous year, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of bank call reports. 2017 represented a new low in annual mortgage repurchase volume since banks and thrifts began reporting this data back in 2008. Most of the heavy damage occurred in the 2009-2011 period, when the banking industry ... [Includes one data chart]
Correspondent production programs continued to gain ground in 2017 in all three major mortgage product categories, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis. Acquiring government-insured loans from correspondent lenders has been a huge part of the Ginnie Mae market in recent years, but it’s also picking up market share in conventional-conforming lending and, to a lesser extent, the jumbo arena. Government-insured lending declined by ... [Includes two data charts]
RSS