Fifteen industry trade groups and other organizations sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and GSE regulator Mel Watt late this week, reminding them that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be reformed through legislation and not some type of recapitalization plan where Congress is cut from the equation.“We are increasingly concerned about efforts to derail comprehensive reform,” they write. “We urge both Treasury and Federal Housing Finance Agency to focus on continuing to work with Congress to end conservatorship through comprehensive, bipartisan, legislative reforms.” No specifics are provided regarding the derailment comment. Presently, there are no viable bills before Congress where a consensus on GSE reform might be reached.
Mortgage lenders that sell loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saw a modest increase in the volume of loans they repurchased from the GSEs during the second quarter of 2017, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis of disclosure reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During the second quarter, lenders repurchased or made indemnifications on $244.44 million of single-family loans pooled in Fannie and Freddie mortgage-backed securities. That was up 2.5 percent from the first three months of the year. On a year-to-date basis, seller buybacks totaled $483.01 million, a 14.5 percent drop from the first six months of 2016.
Lawsuits arising from violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act have increased tremendously over the last couple of years and technology has been trying to stem the tide. By all accounts, TCPA litigation is out of control, wrote Charles Insler, an attorney in the St. Louis office of Hepler Broom, in an analysis of TCPA litigation trends earlier this year for the American Bar Association. Quoting from a 2016 opinion from the Seventh Circuit, Insler noted that TCPA litigation has ...
Most of the hindrances to wider adoption of digital mortgages have to do with the many moving parts associated with the mortgage transaction as well the numerous parties involved with it, and not the legal landscape, according to one top attorney. “The common misconception is that there are a lot of legal roadblocks [to paperless lending]. And there certainly are some. There are some states that don’t support it as fully as would be necessary,” Scott Samlin, a partner with ...
Commercial banks and thrifts reported a solid increase in retail mortgage originations during the second quarter of 2017, but loan sales were down from the previous period. Banks originated $83.98 billion of single-family mortgages through their retail mortgage-banking platforms during the second quarter, a 16.7 percent increase from the first three months of the year, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call report data. The total fell well short of ... [Includes one data chart]
Lenders with better-than-average origination practices tend to produce mortgages with less default risk across different loan products, according to a new study sponsored by the Mortgage Bankers Association. “Managing Mortgage Product Development Risk” focuses on several key issues in risk layering, including the morphing of loan products designed for one type of borrower to a different population, and the added risk of sloppy processing systems. The paper, authored by Clifford Rossi ...
A number of lenders outside of the mortgage market are starting to rely on alternative data to help make underwriting decisions. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is also encouraging use of such alternative data sources, which could prompt adoption by more lenders. Speaking at the ABS East conference produced by Information Management Network this week in Miami Beach, Joanne Gaskin, a senior director at FICO, said some lenders are relying on ...
CMG Mortgage, San Ramon, CA, has launched a new service called HomeFundMe that is geared toward helping loan applicants gather up enough money for a downpayment – using the Internet, of course. There’s a catch though: applicants who use the “crowd funding” platform have to take out a mortgage with CMG, which bears the name of its founder and CEO Chris George. In a recent interview with Inside Mortgage Trends, George was reluctant to estimate how much money ...
The wholesale-broker channel accounts for a relatively small amount of new business in the jumbo mortgage market, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of lender surveys. Brokers accounted for just 4.6 percent of jumbo originations during the second quarter of 2017, although volume was up 13.7 percent from the first three months. The problem is that jumbo lending by a diverse sample of mortgage lenders was up 19.9 percent overall, meaning ... [Includes three data charts]
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