Researcher Tom Popik said lenders may be missing opportunities to leverage strong homebuyer contacts acquired through the mortgage preapproval process.
Last week, the House Financial Services Committee approved H.R. 1486, the Taking Account of Bureaucrats’ Spending Act, or TABS Act, which would subject the CFPB to the congressional appropriations process, ostensibly to make the bureau more accountable to taxpayers, and more vulnerable to political opponents, according to supporters of the consumer regulator. “Every government agency should be accountable to the elected representatives of ‘We the People’ and the CFPB should not be an exception to that rule,” said Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-TX. “We have the Pentagon which is on budget. We have the Justice Department which is on budget,” he added. “There is certainly no greater duty we have than to provide for the common defense, and we do not ...
In another sign that the mortgage market continues to heal, consumer complaints to the CFPB about their residential mortgages continued to fall broadly during the first quarter and on an annual basis, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside the CFPB. The latest data from the bureau’s consumer complaint database show that total gripes about mortgages are down 6.7 percent from the fourth quarter, and off 4.1 percent from year-ago levels. Borrower kvetching about loan modification issues was even better, down 9.8 percent and 13.9 percent, respectively, for the two periods...
Many mortgage industry attorneys seem convinced that PHH Corp. will succeed – at least at the appellate court level – in defying the CFPB in its ongoing legal dispute with the bureau. The crux of the dispute is the bureau’s assertion that PHH violated the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and harmed consumers through a mortgage insurance kickback scheme tied to a captive MI. Last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia heard oral arguments in the case, PHH Corp. v CFPB, and the day did not go well for the bureau. Former CFPB enforcement attorney Jennifer Lee, now a partner with the Dorsey & Whitney law firm in Washington, DC, succinctly summarized the tough day the bureau ...
Former Federal Trade Commission official Todd Zywicki had a blunt message for the U.S. Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee recently when it comes to the CFPB and its voluminous new mortgage rules: Many smaller banks have simply chosen to exit the residential finance sector rather than bear the increased regulatory costs and risks. The former director of policy planning at the FTC cited a survey conducted by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center which found “64 percent of small banks reported that they were making changes to their mortgage offerings because of [the] Dodd-Frank [Act], and 15 percent said that they had either exited or were considering exiting residential mortgage markets entirely.” Also, almost 60 percent of small banks ...
Nonbank mortgage servicers could find themselves subject to more thorough registration requirements or greater data reporting mandates – or both – after the Government Accountability Office concluded that the CFPB does not have all the information it needs to oversee all such entities. “CFPB directly oversees nonbank servicers as part of its responsibility to help ensure compliance with federal laws governing mortgage lending and consumer financial protection,” GAO said in a new report. “However, CFPB does not have a mechanism to develop a comprehensive list of nonbank servicers and, therefore, does not have a full record of entities under its purview. As a result, CFPB may not be able to comprehensively enforce compliance with consumer financial laws.” According to the government watchdog ...
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not conducting loan-level reviews for compliance with the CFPB’s integrated disclosure, and that threatens investors in the pair’s future credit-risk transfer transactions with the possibility of some modest losses because of lender compliance violations, according to a recent report from Moody’s Investor Service. “We expect overall losses on these transactions owing to TRID violations to be fairly small, despite our expectations that the frequency of violations will be high, at least initially,” analysts at the rating service said. “Furthermore, lender representations and warranties and the government-sponsored enterprises’ ability to remove defective loans from the transactions will likely mitigate some of these losses.” Damages for TRID violations are less significant for a securitization transaction compared ...
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