CEO Debra Still of Pulte Mortgage blamed low usage on the fact that Fannie and Freddie use different terminology and eligibility criteria for things like area median income.
PHH officials say the company has improved its servicing operations in recent years and agreed to the consent order “to avoid the distraction and expense of litigation.”
Mortgage lenders and servicers could see a dramatic change in the regulatory environment following the election of Donald Trump as president with a GOP-controlled Congress. During a campaign of many and sometimes conflicting promises, Trump vowed to repeal the Dodd-Frank Act, which would require Congressional action and, if carried out in its entirety, would abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Some observers think a more likely outcome is a restructuring of the CFPB itself and curbing of some regulatory and enforcement actions, perhaps with new leadership. Mortgage lending issues were...
The primary mortgage insurance market remained on track for its best year ever during the third quarter of 2016, as the government-insured sectors gained some ground on private MIs, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance ranking and analysis. Mortgage lenders originated a record $220.46 billion of home loans with some form of primary MI during the third quarter, a 16.6 percent increase from the previous period. That brought year-to-date primary MI activity to $553.77 billion, just $92.40 billion less than the all-time annual record of $646.17 billion set in 2015. The government-insured market – mostly FHA and VA – was...[Includes three data tables]
Come February 1 of next year, Fannie Mae will temporarily halt bulk transfers of mortgage servicing rights as it upgrades its reporting systems, a change the industry has known about for quite some time, but one that still promises to cause headaches. The moratorium runs from Feb. 1, 2017, through March 31, according to Fannie lender letter LL-2016-01, at a time when seller-servicers are implementing new investor reporting requirements. The government-sponsored enterprise is advising servicers that if they want to avoid disruption they “should not propose post-delivery servicing transfer effective dates that fall during” the two months. According to investment bankers that buy and sell servicing rights for a living, the moratorium can be worked...
PHH Corp. and Ocwen Financial – both large publicly traded nonbank mortgage lenders – released third quarter results suggesting that at least one of them, Ocwen, might have a future. Ocwen, which has been bleeding red ink for roughly two years, posted net third-quarter earnings of $9.4 million, though there were several caveats to its results, including previously announced legal settlements that have yet to be paid. Still, Ocwen continued...
Low-downpayment programs introduced by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac almost two years ago have been slow to gain traction. According to an Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of mortgage-backed securities data, the two government-sponsored enterprises purchased $10.31 billion of purchase mortgages with loan-to-value ratios of 96 to 97 percent during the first nine months of 2016. However, nearly half of that came in the third quarter, which saw a 52.7 percent jump from the previous period. Bob Ryan, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s division of conservatorship, said...
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