Lenders whose fiscal years ended on Oct. 31 or Nov. 30, 2013, must complete their annual recertification by their respective deadlines, Jan. 31 and Feb. 28, 2014, or face dire consequences, the FHA warned. These lenders must complete their recertification through the current system, the Lender Assessment Sub-System (LASS), which will soon be retired and replaced with the Lender Electronic Assessment Portal (LEAP). The LASS enables lenders to submit their information, including net worth, liquidity and audited financial data, electronically. LEAP will go live in April and ...

FHA endorsements fell 25.1 percent in the third quarter of 2013 from the previous quarter as interest rates roller-coastered and refinancing lost steam, according to Inside FHA Lending’s analysis of FHA data. After delayed reporting for two months, the FHA also released data showing a 27.9 percent decline in new endorsements in November from October, with lenders reporting $8.7 billion in total originations for the month. Purchase mortgages accounted for 77.1 percent of November’s FHA volume. Fixed-rate mortgages comprised 97.2 percent of total originations for the month. On a quarter-to-quarter basis, production fell to ... [2 charts]

Specifically, the CFPB is seeking comment on what consumers find most problematic about the closing process, including errors and changes at the closing table and the involvement of third-parties.

Former CFPB executive Raj Date hopes to be in the non-QM market by mid-year 2014.

Citigroup marked up the asset value of its MSRs by 5 percent, on a sequential basis, to $2.718 billion. Compared to 4Q12, its MSRs are now worth 40 percent more - even though its overall portfolio has been shrinking in size.

Certain members of Congress want the Fair Isaac "lock" on GSE credit scores to be broken.

According to figures compiled by Inside Mortgage Finance, Flagstar is the nation’s second largest wholesale/broker lender. It also has a fairly large presence in the warehouse market.

Now that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has delivered its integrated mortgage disclosure project, the agency is asking consumers to identify the key “pain points” associated with closing and how they might by mitigated by market innovations and technology. “The CFPB seeks to encourage the development of a more streamlined, efficient and educational closing process as the mortgage industry increases its usage of technology, electronic signatures and paperless processes,” the bureau said in a recent notice. The plan is to “encourage interventions that increase consumer knowledge, understanding and confidence at closing,” the agency said. Specifically, comment is sought...

A lot of prospective homebuyers may be shut out of the market if their mortgage financing can’t pass muster with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s qualified-mortgage standard, congressional testimony this week suggested. Witnesses from The Peoples Bank Company, of Coldwater, OH, and Quicken Loans said during a House Financial Services Financial Institutions Subcommittee hearing this week that their firms plan to stay away from making mortgages that don’t fit into either the safe harbor or the rebuttable-presumption QM boxes. “There is...

The housing market is in the midst of a bubble or a gradual recovery, depending on who you ask. Analysts on either side of the debate point to the agency dominance of the mortgage market as one of the factors driving up home prices. Peter Wallison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, warned last week that the housing market is in the middle of another bubble. “Housing bubbles become visible – and can legitimately be called bubbles – when housing prices diverge significantly from rents,” he wrote in an op-ed published in the New York Times. Wallison pointed...