Fannie Announces Plans to Sell DC Headquarters, Office Consolidation. Fannie Mae told its employees last week that it plans to sell its iconic headquarters in Northwest Washington, DC, and consolidate its five area office locations into one over the next two to three years. Fannie, a ward of the government for six years, owns its headquarters at 3900 Wisconsin Ave., but leases other locations in the area. It also occupies 4000 Wisconsin Ave. The company has offices in Virginia, Texas and California. Employees outside of the Washington area will not be affected, a spokesman clarified.

Commercial banks and thrifts continued to reduce the amount of mortgage servicing they do on behalf of other investors during the second quarter of 2014, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of bank call-report data. With declining interest rates during the period and the prospect of faster prepayments, most banks also wrote down the fair market value they placed on their mortgage servicing rights, the data show. Banks and thrifts serviced a total of ... [Includes one data chart]

There is nothing like a robust rebound in mortgage production activity to bolster mortgage banking profitability. New data from the Mortgage Bankers Association show that the average mortgage banking operation saw net income quadruple during the second quarter, jumping from a measly $342,000 net profit in the first three months of the year to $1.374 million. The MBA quarterly performance survey found that 81.5 percent of participating lenders reported positive pretax income ...

Prices paid for nonperforming residential loans have continued to rise this year, which is great news for sellers of distressed product, but not so good for buyers. In fact, there are signs that certain buyers are dropping out of the market because returns are getting too low for their tastes. One Midwest-based buyer of NPLs told Inside Mortgage Trends that he recently closed a fund that was banking his acquisitions because investment returns are now in the 9 percent range ...

Some of the features of the Private Mortgage Insurance Eligibility Requirements recently put out by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Finance Agency would probably increase costs and cyclicality in the mortgage and housing markets to an unnecessary degree, according to a new report by Moody’s Analytics and the Urban Institute. Study authors Mark Zandi and Cristian deRitis (Moody’s) and Jim Parrott (the Urban Institute) said the standards should succeed in ensuring that ...

The Inspector General of the Federal Housing Finance Agency has some sage advice for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: the next time you suspect one of your seller/servicers is up to no good, tell their rival and their regulator. This type of wisdom – and more – is contained in a recent IG post-mortem report on one of the most spectacular mortgage failures of the past decade: Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, a large nonbank that collapsed in the late summer of 2009 after it was discovered ...

Late last month, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced the participants in its high-profile eClosing pilot project. The bureau chose a mix of technology vendors providing eClosing solutions and lenders that have contracted to close loans using those solutions. The vendor participants are Accenture Mortgage Cadence, DocMagic, eLynx, Pavaso, and PiersonPatterson LLP. The lenders are Blanco National Bank, Boeing Employees Credit Union, Franklin First Financial, Flagstar Bank ...

Homeownership among young adults under age 35 has dropped substantially, particularly among prime first-time homebuyers, despite the fact that owning a house has become less costly than renting in recent years, according to a Fannie Mae analysis. Specifically, the government-sponsored enterprise found that the homeownership rate of “prime” first-time homebuyers – defined as educated, married couples in their early 30s with kids and lots of money – fell by 8.6 percent between 2006 and 2012 ...

Banks and thrifts reported an 11.0 percent decline in the volume of mortgage repurchases and indemnifications they made during the second quarter of 2014, compared to the first three months of the year. An Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data found that bank and thrift repurchases and indemnifications totaled $1.012 billion in the second quarter, the lowest level since the first quarter of 2008. Buyback volume has been ... [Includes one data chart]