Fixed-rate mortgages with 15-year terms are good products for low- and middle-income borrowers or have limited appeal for such borrowers as well as for lenders, according to competing think tanks.Co-directors of the American Enterprise Institute’s International Center on Housing Risk developed the Wealth Building Home Loan that Bank of America started offering in September. Edward Pinto, one of the co-directors of the AEI’s center, said the 15-year fixed-rate WBHL requires little or no downpayment, due in part to BofA’s partnership with the Neighborhood Assistance Corp. BofA will also provide a subsidy to decrease the interest rate on the loans. Pinto said the loan has much less foreclosure risk than a 30-year fixed-rate FHA mortgage due to the equity building ...

A recent independent survey commissioned by Discover Home Loans found that most homebuyers believe online technology improves their search and purchasing ability. According to the results, 89 percent of homebuyers used some form of online technology to help them with the home purchase process. Almost half of all homebuyers, 47 percent, said technology saved them money while 92 percent said it saved them time. Specifically, 83 percent of the group looked at real estate listings or applications like Trulia or Zillow, while 72 percent used online maps or map apps to explore potential neighborhoods. Approximately 55 percent researched a neighborhood using local websites. The majority of respondents, 90 percent, said using technology was a “positive experience.” Two-thirds of this group ...

Fannie, Freddie Conforming Loan Limits Mostly Unchanged for 2015. The Federal Housing Finance Agency this week said that conforming loan limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2015 would remain at current levels in most markets. For much of the country, the conforming loan limit for one-unit properties will remain at $417,000. The loan limits are established under the terms of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 and are calculated each year.

The Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization recently released version 3.3.1 of its residential reference model for public comment. This version of the standard includes data points and structures related to a number of recent regulatory and reporting requirements and additions in the areas of mortgage insurance coverage and conditions, title, payoff and property valuation. “Version 3.3.1 of the MISMO Reference Model and Logical Data Dictionary are the direct result of MISMO contributors from across the industry collaborating to solve business problems and develop the standards needed to meet industry needs in today’s rapidly changing regulatory and compliance environment,” said Mike Fratantoni, president of MISMO and chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association. In addition to the LDD, XML schema and ...

Understanding the ebb and flow of mortgage debt is hampered by a lack of data on mortgage flows, making it more difficult for policymakers and regulators to deal with fluctuations in overall credit growth. A working paper published recently by the Federal Reserve attempts to make sense of the factors driving the volatility in the stock debt by analyzing changes in aggregate mortgage debt into mortgage inflows and outflows. It attributes these inflows and outflows to more micro-components such as investor activity, first-time homebuying and borrower credit score. “Quantifying these various flows into and out of the pool of mortgage debt allows for a precise assessment of the relative importance over time,” the paper noted. “Creating such data on an ...

Commercial banks and thrifts reported a combined $4.67 billion in mortgage-banking income during the third quarter of 2014, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data. Third-quarter results were down 4.9 percent from the second quarter, which is consistent with the figures reported by publicly held mortgage lenders. Year-to-date mortgage-banking income for the depository institutions was $12.96 billion, down 37.0 percent from the first nine months of last year. Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase continued to rank as the top two banks in mortgage-banking income, but both reported declines of more than 25 percent from the second quarter to the third. On a year-to-date basis, the two lenders accounted for 47.3 percent of total mortgage-banking income earned ...

Together, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in October posted a combined decline in the volume of single-family mortgages securitized, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. Fannie and Freddie issued $63.1 billion in single-family mortgage-backed securities in October, a 1.5 percent decrease from September. On a year-to-date basis, October’s MBS issuance dropped an even steeper 50.6 percent.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities remained the preferred investment choice of the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks during the third quarter of 2014, with a very slight decline from the previous quarter, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside The GSEs based on data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Meanwhile, Ginnie Mae securities posted effectively no movement within the FHLBank system during the three-month period ending Sept. 30, 2014.

Nonbank mortgage servicers are bracing for an onslaught of new capital recommendations from the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, which could see the light of day in early 2015. But the industry did receive one piece of good news: although the CSBS is working on what it calls “options for prudential standards,” the organization will not be addressing capital for nonbank originators, a CSBS official told Inside Mortgage Finance. The group is...

Industry groups say they are generally pleased with last week’s more detailed update to Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s representation-and-warranty framework, but lenders remain expectant of additional details from the Federal Housing Finance Agency going forward. The new rules, retroactive to January 2013, provide that lenders might not be required to repurchase loans that contain data inaccuracies or misrepresentations of buyers’ qualifications, unless those inaccuracies and misrepresentations are “significant” or appear in multiple loans. The clarifications of life-of-loan exclusions announced by the government-sponsored enterprises are designed...