Industry observers are weighing in on the redesigned Uniform Residential Loan Application, an industry standard that has largely remained the same for the past 20 years, until now. The GSEs published the new form last week to give lenders ample time to get familiar with it. The updated form won’t officially be in use until Jan. 1, 2018. The URLA is for single-family loans submitted to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae, as well as mortgages insured by the FHA, VA or U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Services. The redesigned form falls under the larger Federal Housing Finance Agency and GSE initiative to standardize single-family mortgage data in the U.S.
Price is paramount to buyers purchasing a mortgage company, but equally important is bringing over the salesforce – namely loan officers – and making sure they stay happy under the new owners. That’s one of many insights contained in a new “In-Focus” report from The Stratmor Group, a consulting firm that plies its trade in the M&A circuit as well as other sectors of the industry. “While the numbers and related analysis are fundamental to the negotiating process, there is an ...
Although the new requirements could prompt an increase in costs, analysts said a new requirement aimed at increasing the number of times troubled borrowers are evaluated for loss mitigation will be particularly helpful in certain states…
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...
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.
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...
Proponents of the mortgage interest tax deduction point out that the real estate and mortgage industries employ thousands upon thousands of workers with spillover to other sectors...
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...
A proposed rule published by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. earlier in the year regarding recordkeeping requirements would “unnecessarily increase costs for banks and servicers,” according to George Green, an associate vice president at the Mortgage Bankers Association. The proposed rule would apply to depositories with more than two million deposit accounts. Under the regulation, banks would generally be required to maintain complete and ...
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