The Federal Housing Finance Agency this week proposed to reduce the affordable housing goals for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac through 2014. The low-income housing goal would be lowered from the current 27 percent to 20 percent, and the very-low-income target would drop slightly, from 8 percent of the government-sponsored enterprises’ business to 7 percent. The agency has not yet calculated the GSEs’ performance on their 2011 affordable housing goals, although un-verified calculations by both companies show that they missed several targets last year. That was also the case in 2010. In 2010, the...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development will sell an estimated 5,000 nonperforming mortgages on the brink of foreclosure in September under an expanded FHA loan-sale program aimed at preventing further growth of the agency’s massive inventory of real estate owned properties. How the deals under the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program will be structured and priced is still not clear. The details are being worked out, said a HUD spokesman. The DASP is an expansion of an FHA pilot program, the Mortgage Acquisition and Disposition Initiative, which began in 2010 and has resulted in the purchase...

A continued outpouring of concerned industry commentary about the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s pending ability-to-repay rule has prompted the bureau to hit the reset button on the public comment period, giving the mortgage lending industry another opportunity to address some limited, specific issues before the rule becomes final. During a hearing in the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, Sen. Mike Crapo, R-ID, pressed his concerns about the rule with CFPB Director Richard Cordray and questioned him about the bureau’s intentions. “The housing credit market...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureaufs recently proposed method of extending its supervisory powers to nonbank mortgage lenders it considers potentially risky seems fairly straightforward. But look closely and several potential sinkholes emerge for such lenders, one leading attorney serving the mortgage industry suggested. Despite its outward simplicity, the proposed process presents several potential pitfalls for nonbanks, according to Eric Mitzenmacher, an associate attorney in the Washington, DC, office of the K&L Gates law firm. To begin with, the bureau does not define griskh...

Data are one of the big drivers behind the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s decision to re-open the public comment period on its ability-to-repay rule before making the new regulation final. The Federal Register notice that announces the re-opening the comment period explains that the CFPB has received data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency tracking the performance of loans bought or backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from 1997 to 2011. The CFPB has also received data on other securitized mortgages. According to the bureau, the data can be tapped for a variety...

House Financial Services Financial Institutions Subcommittee Chairman Shelley Moore Capito, R]WV, and Rep. Brad Sherman, D]CA, have been circulating a gdear colleagueh letter in an effort to ratchet up political pressure on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to adopt a gsafe harborh for its pending qualified mortgage rule. gWe believe that the final rule must structure the QM as a strong legal safe harbor, not a rebuttable presumption. Both could still be challenged in court,h the lawmakers said. gHowever, as the Federal Reserve correctly stated in its preamble to the rule...

A handful of Republican members of the U.S. Senate have asked Richard Cordray, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to detail how his agency intends to respond to the internal control and accounting systems weaknesses the Government Accountability Office identified in a recent report. Last month, the GAO issued a report entitled, “Management Report: Opportunities for Improvement in the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection’s Internal Controls and Accounting Procedures,” based on an audit GAO did of the CFPB’s 2011 financial statements. The GAO listed...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the four prudential regulators have released a ¡°Memorandum of Understanding on Supervisory Coordination¡± that clarifies how they plan to coordinate their supervisory activities, consistent with the Dodd©\Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Dodd©\Frank requires the CFPB and the prudential regulators ¨C the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the National Credit Union Administration ¨C to synchronize important aspects of their supervision of insured...

In the case of Brisbin v. Aurora Loan Services LLC, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has ruled that a lender’s oral promise to postpone foreclosure is unenforceable; that is, that such a promise is a credit agreement that has to be in writing if it is to be enforceable. Borrower Alison Brisbin filed this lawsuit in Minnesota state court against Aurora Loan Services LLC, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems Inc. and Freddie Mac, seeking legal and equitable relief from the foreclosure and sale of her home. She alleged three legal theories for invalidation of the...

The California Assembly and Senate unanimously passed identical six-bill packages known as the California Homeowner Bill of Rights to simplify the state Attorney General’s ability to initiate and conduct statewide grand jury mortgage fraud investigations. The legislation has been designed to guarantee:Basic standards of fairness in the mortgage process, including an end to dual-track foreclosures.Transparency in the mortgage process, including a single point of contact for homeowners....