While Fannie Mae has mopped up virtually all of the buyback disputes on loans more than a few years old, Freddie Mac still has a stubborn supply of legacy repurchase demands on its hands. A new Inside The GSEs analysis of repurchase activity disclosures for the second quarter of 2016 reveals that 39.6 percent of Freddie’s pending and disputed buyback claims involved loans that were securitized prior to 2008. At Fannie, such loans accounted for just 0.7 percent of unresolved buyback demands as of the end of June. Freddie did make progress during the second quarter, however. In fact, 34.8 percent of the seller repurchases or indemnifications made during the...
One former GSE executive lost his severance package case and another settled in a long-standing civil fraud lawsuit. Both cases came to a conclusion last week. Anthony Piszel, former chief financial officer at Freddie Mac, appealed a judgment from the U.S. Court of Federal Claims dismissing his complaint that Freddie owed him payment for his “golden parachute” compensation after he was terminated without cause at the start of the conservatorship. The question came down to whether or not a government prohibition on making golden parachute payments to terminated Freddie employees was illegal or not. Piszel was terminated two weeks after...
Panelists, including former Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Ed DeMarco, said that mortgage servicing has evolved over the years but the costs are still decades behind the times. During a recent seminar on mortgage servicing hosted by CoreLogic and the Urban Institute, industry experts discussed rising costs and the frequency of servicing transfers.Panelists, including DeMarco, now a senior fellow at the Milken Institute, said that mortgage servicing compensation has not changed in decades as the servicing industry itself has undergone what he called “profound changes. The minimum servicing fee for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has been stuck at 25 basis points since the 1980s, he said.
FHFA’s TCPA Exemption Request Denied. The Federal Communications Commission turned down the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s request to exempt GSE mortgage servicing calls from prohibitions against robocalls, or automated dialing and calling systems, to contact delinquent borrowers. It refused the request, citing the exemption for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans “because little in the way of facts has been entered into the record.” According to the commission, the FHFA, in its request, cites two different exemption provisions. However, the FCC said the FHFA failed to provide the information necessary for determining whether the calls at issue would satisfy the threshold requirements for exemption. Under the rule, calls to cell phones are capped at no more than three attempts...
Originators were asked if TRID has affected their willingness to originate small loans. Roughly 53.8 percent said “no change,” while 46.2 percent said “yes, moderately.”