Fannie Mae launched a $10 million innovation challenge this week asking for ideas on healthy affordable housing. The initiative is a two-year commitment to source new ideas related to addressing affordable housing needs by reaching outside of Fannie and its traditional partners. “We recognize the value in breaking down silos. We want to work with new partners on issues that are inextricably linked to affordable housing in order to create comprehensive solutions,” said Fannie’s Vice President of Sustainable Communities Maria Evans. She went on to say that the GSE is incubating innovative ideas that directly address its mission to bring affordability and stability to underserved areas...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s examination program has not made any progress in seven years, according to new report by the FHFA’s Office of Inspector General, which said the number of commissioned examiners has actually decreased. The FHFA is currently conducting an internal review of the program. The IG has been asking the FHFA to beef up its examinations program since 2011. As a result, in 2013 the agency developed its own Housing Finance Examiner Commission Program that offered classroom courses, on-the-job training and final examinations. But the program hasn’t been successful, according to data obtained from the IG.

California remained the top state for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac activity in the first six months of 2018 as volume reached $68.22 billion, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. About 44.4 percent was from the purchase market and 20.8 percent were first-time homebuyers. Texas trailed in second place with $27.57 billion in volume with 69.0 percent of that being attributed to the purchase market. Texas was followed closely by Florida with $25.01 billion. Rounding out the top five for GSE volume were Washington ($16.08 billion) and Colorado ($14.99 billion).

The regular fraud reports created by the GSEs are not being put to good use by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said the FHFA Office of Inspector General. In fact, FHFA’s examiners don’t even review the reports when supervising Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac activities. In an evaluation report published earlier this week, the IG said the FHFA does not make a documented, systematic use of the content of monthly and quarterly fraud reports that could be helpful for examiners. There’s no specific methodology for fraud detection and reporting, only requiring the GSEs to maintain adequate and efficient internal controls, policies, procedures and an operational training...

Fannie Mae is helping to alleviate some of the additional responsibilities servicers take on during post-foreclosure sales on reverse mortgage loans. In a Sept. 18 announcement, the GSE updated its policy and said it will now take responsibility for ground rents, co-op fees and assessments, and property taxes for certain properties in Fannie’s real estate- owned inventory. The policy change is applicable to all reverse mortgage loans. Last year Fannie also took on additional responsibilities from servicers for post-foreclosure sales. The GSE announced it would pay property taxes for acquired properties with a foreclosure sale date or final acceptance of an executed mortgage release after July 7, 2017.

Lenders looking for efficiencies should adopt artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain, according to various technology vendors. They claim that the technology can be implemented without exceptionally high costs but caution that early adopters face some risks. AI is generally defined as a collection of machine-learning algorithms assembled for certain tasks. Blockchain is distributed ledger technology. The tech was an area of focus at the ABS East conference ...

Two new mortgage underwriting solutions designed to help lenders streamline their current mortgage workflows and reduce cost, as well as enable them to assist non-prime borrowers to obtain home loans, have hit the market. CoreLogic’s AutomatIQ Borrower streamlines underwriting by digitizing, standardizing and automating borrower analysis and verification. The tool bridges the gap between point-of-sale and underwriting to create a smoothly running mortgage origination process ...

The Money Source hopes to double its volume of subservicing contracts to almost $8.0 billion by yearend, capitalizing on what it feels is an underserved market: Smaller clients that don’t receive hands-on service from the giants of the industry, namely Cenlar and Dovenmuehle. At least that’s the view from TMS President Ali Vafai, who says there’s a huge “void” of subservicers that can effectively handle high-touch product, especially Ginnie Mae receivables. “The problem is that some Ginnie subservicers ...

State-licensed mortgage lenders originated $239.70 billion of home mortgages in the second quarter of this year, according to nonbank mortgage call report figures compiled by the Nationwide Multistate Licensing System. The sector posted an 18.9 percent increase in origination volume from the first three months of the year, slightly more than the 17.1 percent rise in total first-lien originations over that period. As a result, the nonbank share of new production ... [Includes two data charts]

Freddie Mac has racked up between three and five servicing-financing transactions with nonbank agency seller-servicers, according to investment bankers familiar with the arrangements. As for the details regarding the deals, Freddie isn’t talking and neither are any of its clients involved in the pilot. The only firm identified by sources thus far as talking to the GSE about a line of credit collateralized by mortgage servicing rights is United Shore Financial, the parent of the nation’s largest table-funder of loan brokers, United Wholesale Mortgage, Troy, MI. The UWM LOC is sized at roughly $55 million, sources told Inside The GSEs. Both Freddie and UWM declined to comment.