MBS industry groups generally support the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s plan to develop a single securitization platform and model pooling and servicing agreements for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But they question whether a standardized system will for the non-agency MBS market or risk-sharing arrangements envisioned for the government-sponsored enterprises. The FHFA has been pushing the two GSEs to standardize their securitization operations in recent years, including uniform data delivery requirements, consistent servicing rules and, most recently, a new framework for seller representations and warranties that will go into effect in January. The agency wants...

Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said this week HUD is considering additional steps to improve the financial health of the FHA single-family program, including raising FICO score requirements and supporting legislation that would take the FHA loan limits back to pre-crisis levels. The HUD secretary found himself in the hot seat before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Development, explaining the results of a recent actuarial audit that placed the FHA’s Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund capital reserve ratio below zero at negative 1.44 percent, representing a negative economic value of $16.3 billion. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-AL, ranking minority member of the committee, raised...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has perhaps overreached in its efforts to develop a post-Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac secondary mortgage market infrastructure as industry groups say the agency’s proposal is “laudable” but rife with unintended consequences. In September, the FHFA in a white paper proposed a framework for both a common securitization platform and a model pooling and servicing agreement with a request for public comment. The proposed infrastructure has...

Banks that have successfully increased their market share of mortgage originations have leveraged existing customer relationships and focused on mortgage processing, according to industry analysts. Cost is an important factor for borrowers, but service and product offerings also play a role. “Lenders must align account-opening channel preferences to customer needs to increase loan applications and achieve their revenue growth and retention goals,” Craig Focardi, a senior research director at Corporate Executive Board TowerGroup, said during a recent webinar hosted by his firm. In the past year, significant gains in market share have been posted...

Congress needs to quit pickpocketing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by diverting guaranty fees from the government-sponsored enterprises to pay for purposes unrelated to housing or risk derailing the fledgling housing market recovery, warn industry groups. The House last week approved H.R. 1629, the STEM Jobs Act of 2012, which would provide visas for qualified workers in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). A manager’s amendment after the bill was sent to the House Rules Committee tacked on a “payfor” requiring the GSEs to increase their g-fees to cover the cost of implementing the bill. “We appreciate...

The mortgage finance industry is getting antsy because the much-anticipated ability-to-repay final rule still has yet to be released by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, even though it was widely expected to come out after the election, perhaps by Thanksgiving. The bureau does not have a specific release date yet, but officials still expect it to happen before the statutory deadline of Jan. 21, 2013. Lenders are pretty amped up...

The state of emergency in the U.S. mortgage market lives on for another year, as the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced that conforming loan limits will remain as they are for 2013. The agency didn’t have much say in the matter, since Congress in late 2011 extended the “emergency” loan limits for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHA through the end of 2013. Lawmakers did lower the top Fannie/Freddie loan in high-cost markets of the lower 48 states to $625,500, while the top-end FHA loan is still $729,750. Although the FHA has not yet announced...

Thanks to the Federal Reserve’s aggressive support for the agency mortgage market and continuing strength in the refinance program for underwater Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac borrowers, mortgage refi activity has accounted for 73.1 percent of 2012’s surging production volume. But home-purchase lending started to regain some market share during the third quarter of 2012, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance ranking and analysis. An estimated $143 billion of home-purchase mortgages were originated during the third quarter, up 10.9 percent from the previous three-month period. By comparison, refinance production was up just 2.8 percent from the second quarter. The purchase-mortgage sector still has...[Includes three data charts]

The Home Affordable Refinance Program hit record levels in the third quarter of 2012, with 286,044 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac borrowers taking advantage of the program designed for underwater borrowers. That was up 17.8 percent from the second quarter and raised total participation in the program to 1.73 million since it began back in 2009. The biggest gains this year have been in the refinances of mortgages with loan-to-value ratios exceeding 105 percent [Includes one data chart] ...

An examination of how quickly the distressed real estate inventory dissipates in three Northeast states suggests that federal policymakers need to pay much more attention to local mortgage market conditions when formulating policy, one researcher says. “A critical issue in today’s housing market concerns both the size of the distressed real estate inventory and the speed at which it will dissolve,” said James Follain, principal of James R Follain LLC and contributing editor to ...