The sooner the Federal Housing Finance Agency acts to clarify Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s positions on what triggers a loan repurchase request, the better it will be for lenders and for the recovery of the housing finance system, industry groups say. Over the past three years, the two GSEs have asked for more than $80 billion in flawed loan repurchases from lenders, prompting an overabundance of underwriting caution, according to Fitch Ratings. “Reduced uncertainty around the reasons as well as the timing and remedies available for repurchase may help ease lenders’ concerns and improve credit availability,” said Fitch. “Establishing clear and detailed repurchase standards, developing reporting and enforcement mechanisms and creating clear timelines that govern the process would be positive steps and would be welcome by lenders and investors alike.”

Freddie Mac announced this week that it has tapped a former JPMorgan Chase executive to serve as the GSE’s new head lawyer. William McDavid will start work next week as Freddie’s executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary. He replaces Alicia Myara, who has served as the GSE’s interim general counsel since November 2011. McDavid was co-general counsel for Chase from 2004 until he retired in 2006 and previously served solo as general counsel for several Chase predecessors going back to Chemical Bank in 1988.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency said last week it is ready to take its initiative to dispose of GSE and government-held real estate-owned properties to the next level, but a California House Republican is demanding the pilot program skip over his state. The FHFA announced it has chosen winning bidders in its REO pilot venture with the transactions expected to close early in the third quarter. Although the winning bidders weren’t publicly identified by the FHFA, the agency has declared this first round to be a success and is planning the next round of sales, according to FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco.

Despite the full implementation of the recently expanded Home Affordable Refinance Program in June and a refi boost that followed, Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s new volume declined during the second quarter of 2012, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. Fannie and Freddie issued $273.95 billion in single-family mortgage backed securities during the second quarter, a 10.2 percent drop from the first three months of the year. Thanks to the huge $305.21 billion of GSE business during the first quarter, the market was still 39.3 percent ahead of the pace set during the first half of 2011.

After months of high-profile publicly and seemingly endless prototypes, consumer testing and discussions with industry stakeholders, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this week issued a detailed proposed rule to integrate the mortgage disclosures consumers get under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and the Truth in Lending Act. The proposal features new “loan estimate” and “closing disclosure” forms to highlight the costs and risks of a mortgage in terms designed to be clearer to consumers and to facilitate shopping. According to the CFPB...

As the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau works to finalize its ability-to-repay qualified mortgage final rule by January, industry officials again called upon Congress to press the bureau to broadly structure the terms of a qualified mortgage and craft a well-defined ability-to-repay rule, along with a strong safe harbor to help provide legal certainty. John Hudson, chairman of government affairs for the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, told lawmakers that industry professionals and “every consumer wanting to participate in homeowner-ship supports common sense underwriting ...

With refinance transactions accounting for three out of four home mortgages financed through agency programs in the first half of 2012, most top lenders securitized significant volumes of refi loans through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae.But a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis and ranking reveals that a number of lenders man-aged to focus on the fast-growing home purchase-mortgage market during the first half of 2012. At the top of that list was Pulte Mortgage, the subsidiary of a national homebuilding company, where pur-chase-money mortgages accounted for 99.0 percent of...

Mortgage repurchase requests by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac show no signs of slowing down, and the two government-sponsored enterprises appear poised to pick up the pace with buyback de-mands targeting mid-tier financial institutions, warned Fitch Ratings. Fitch issued a note last week in which the rating agency cited signs of a potential shift in focus by the GSEs from the big banks to the smaller regional banks as a target of opportunity for increased representation and warranty claims.“Recent announcements by PNC, SunTrust and First Horizon that they intend to boost future GSE ...

For more than a decade, Countrywide Financial’s “VIP Program” approved nearly 18,000 sweet-heart mortgages to congressmen, policymakers and officials at the government-sponsored enterprises in an effort to curry favor in Washington and strengthen its business relationship with Fannie Mae, ac-cording to a newly released congressional inquiry. Last week’s 136-page report from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair-man Darrell Issa, R-CA, completed a three-year investigation by the committee of Countrywide’s “Friends of Angelo” program, which ran from January ...

Consumers who take out mortgages that are considered high cost currently receive special pro-tections from fees and risky loan terms. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this week came out with a proposed rule that would expand what is considered a high]cost mortgage and provide more protections to consumers who take out those loans. Loans that meet high-cost triggers under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act are subject to special disclosure requirements and restrictions on loan terms, and borrowers in high-cost mortgages have enhanced remedies ...