False Claims Act enforcement against FHA lenders appears to have slowed with no new cases being filed by the Department of Justice or referred by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general for nearly a year. Neither agency has gone after any lender for alleged False Claims Act violations since May of last year when the Department of Justice intervened in an FCA case brought by a whistleblower against Guild Mortgage, an FHA direct endorsement lender. The complaint alleged that San Diego-based Guild Mortgage knowingly approved loans that violated FHA rules while falsely certifying compliance with those rules. The alleged violations occurred between 2006 and 2011, resulting in “tens of millions of dollars” in losses to HUD. The case is pending in federal district court in Washington, DC. Indications are the FCA cases involving FHA lenders have ...

Requesting a certificate of eligibility (COE) may be just a click away but the process is not without pitfalls, cautioned a panel of VA loan production officers during an industry conference. The panelists – Maxine Henry, program analyst with the VA Central Office; Ricardo Holloway, loan production officer with the Atlanta Regional Loan Center; and Paula Jesse, assistant loan production officer with the Denver RLC – urged veterans to order their COE early in the loan-application process to avoid any hiccups. A COE verifies to the lender that the veteran/borrower is eligible for a VA loan. Ordering early would help prevent last-minute delays, said Henry. “It is a problem if the veteran is at the closing table and still does not have a COE because it was ordered just a few days prior to closing,” Henry noted. Other potential hitches are incorrect documentation or receiving a VA determination that the ...

Loan processing for incompetent veterans presents significant challenges to VA lenders, requiring strict compliance with special guidance on top of the basic VA underwriting rules. One challenge is dealing with legal appointees who assist and represent veterans in legal transactions, such as applying for a mortgage loan. There are ways to determine whether a veteran is incompetent, said Mark Jamison, loan production officer (LPO) with the VA Cleveland Regional Center, during the VA Lender Conference in Kansas City, MO, last month. The Department of Veterans Affairs or a probate court can deem a veteran incompetent due to severe injury, medical conditions, mental disorders, and financial instability, he said. A mortgage lender could make a determination of incompetency if the initial purchase contract documents were signed by an attorney-in-fact, the veteran divulged the incompetency, or the ...

Poor agency oversight of voluntary lender terminations of FHA insurance on single-family home loans has resulted in increased risk for borrowers, premium overpayments and inaccurate records, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general. The IG gave the department a poor grade for failing to ensure that lenders properly processed voluntary terminations of FHA coverage and disclosed to borrowers the implications of such termination. The audit report blamed HUD’s failure on its inability to detect and deter lender errors while processing voluntary terminations, causing borrowers to lose FHA-insurance protection and overpay FHA premiums. HUD’s records also were skewed because of the oversight, the report noted. IG auditors reviewed a statistical sample of 115 of the 3,690 loans that were terminated voluntarily by lenders during fiscal years 2015 and ...

Difficulty coming up with comparable home sales data in rural areas has prompted the Department of Veterans Affairs to clarify its requirements for comparable sales for VA appraisals. The VA lender handbook requires comparable sales in appraisal reports to be located as near as possible to the property. Compliance with the requirement has been particularly difficult for VA lenders in rural and certain urban areas, where properties are a good distance apart. According to VA Circular 26-17-14, VA does not set a minimum or maximum distance between properties for an appraisal but requires that “comparable sales should be located as close to the subject as practical.” In cases where obtaining data is a problem because properties may be many miles from the subject property, appraisers should explain why those comparable sales were used and how they compare and/or compete with the ...

Moody’s Rates Credit Suisse FHA Securitization Transaction. Moody’s assigned investment-grade ratings to Credit Suisse’s first securitization deal in 2017 backed by seasoned re-performing and performing, fully amortizing, fixed- and adjustable-rate mortgages insured by FHA. The deal is the first FHA-insured re-performing transaction since 2010, according to the rating agency. The collateral pool is comprised of 672 first-lien, fixed-rate loans and ARMs with a weighted average updated FICO score of 614 and loan-to-value ratio of 94.2 percent. Approximately 82.4 percent of the loans in the collateral pool were previously modified. Approximately 52.8 percent of the loans have been current for at least 24 months. Another 17.3 percent of the loans have been current for more than 12 months. Comments Sought on Various Information Collection Proposals. The Department of Housing and ...

The retail segment saw the biggest decline, dropping 34.6 percent to an estimated $221.0 billion.

One constitutional issue that garnered some attention: whether a multi-member commission is more legitimate than a single director…

Citadel’s small-balance commercial program will include mixed-use retail and other loan types.

Stearns said that temporary interest rate buy-downs are good for borrowers who expect their incomes to increase in the relatively near future.