Some industry officials, including Marc Savitt, president of the National Association of Independent Housing Professionals, are worried about the methodology of the project...
Banks with significant portfolio capacity continue to stock up on mortgages because they offer strong returns and can help efforts to cross-sell other products. While most of the mortgages being added to portfolios are jumbos, in some instances banks are retaining conventional mortgages. JPMorgan Chase reported that it added mortgages with a balance of $19.0 billion to its portfolio holdings during the second quarter of 2015. Marianne Lake, chief financial officer at the bank ...
United Wholesale Mortgage announced this week that it’s offering interest-only mortgages, joining a growing number of banks and nonbanks originating the loans that don’t meet standards for qualified mortgages. Officials at United Wholesale noted a distinction in the lender’s IO product: “Large banking institutions have widely offered this option, but mostly restricted its availability to jumbo borrowers,” United Wholesale said. The lender is offering IOs with ...
Industry participants largely support a plan from the Federal Housing Finance Agency for adjustments to the conforming loan limit. The $417,000 loan limit applicable to the government-sponsored enterprises could be increased as soon as January, depending on house-price appreciation trends over the next few months. The FHFA’s proposal said the regulator planned to use the “expanded data” house price index that the agency has published since 2011 to ...
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is considering revising income documentation standards to help borrowers that have nontraditional sources of income, according to Richard Cordray, the director of the agency. At a hearing last week by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, Sen. Mark Warner, D-VA, raised concerns about the income documentation standards included in Appendix Q of the CFPB’s ability-to-repay rule. Non-agency lenders ...
Department of Housing and Urban Development program staff and the agency’s inspector general are reportedly at loggerheads over an IG recommendation to deny FHA insurance to loans that receive downpayment assistance from programs funded through premium-pricing mechanisms. Responding to critics, the HUD OIG is standing by its audit findings, which could force the HUD deputy secretary to intervene in order to resolve the issues raised by the audit report and restore lender confidence. The report’s recommendation has alarmed lenders that participate in downpayment assistance “gift” programs run by housing finance agencies (HFAs). This prompted Ed Golding, HUD’s principal deputy assistant secretary for housing and head of the FHA, to issue a clarification of the FHA’s position on the issue. Golding’s note reaffirmed FHA’s support for certain downpayment assistance programs (DAPs), “like those run by ...
The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s proposal to remove a key disclosure in a standard HUD/VA form that comes with a residential mortgage closing document is getting flak from the mortgage industry and from some members of Congress. Leading Democrats on the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees are pushing HUD to reconsider the proposal. They fear the proposed change would make it easier for lenders that have engaged in criminal behavior to re-enter the FHA and VA markets and continue their illegal lending practices. Among other things, HUD’s proposal would eliminate the requirement that FHA lenders certify on each loan application that they are not, or have not recently been, subject to certain charges or penalties. In their letter, Senators Sherrod Brown, D-OH, and Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, urged HUD to ...
A multi-million dollar false claim lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice against Wells Fargo in 2012 appears headed to trial unless both sides agree to renegotiate a settlement. Brought under the federal False Claims Act, the lawsuit has moved on to the discovery phase of the litigation following a failed attempt by the parties to reach a settlement. The DOJ has wielded the FCA effectively in the past couple of years in efforts to recover losses from lenders that allegedly committed loan fraud against the FHA. A string of FCA lawsuits against FHA lenders has resulted in approximately $4.5 billion in recoveries for the government. The 2012 lawsuit alleged that Wells Fargo misled the FHA as to the quality of underwriting on 6,320 FHA-insured loans, which later caused approximately $190 million in losses to the agency’s mortgage insurance fund. Wells Fargo has denied the allegations and maintains that, as a ...
RSS