Freddie Mac introduced a new conventional 3 percent downpayment program that is open to a wider range of borrowers with no income restrictions or limitations as to where the borrower lives. The new mortgage product, HomeOne, was created to allow lenders flexibility when it comes to helping borrowers anywhere in the country become homeowners and overcome the common hurdle of a lack of downpayment resources, said Danny Gardner, Freddie’s senior vice president of single-family affordable lending and access to credit. He said HomeOne is great for potential borrowers looking to...

Pershing Square Holdings, one of the largest institutional investors in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac common stock, is doubling down on its investment in the two mortgage giants. But it’s taking a different tack, buying up junior preferred stock rather than increasing its holdings of common. The change in strategy was mentioned in the firm’s annual report to shareholders and comes at a time when the chances of housing-finance reform look nil for 2018. How much PSH paid for the junior preferred is unknown. According to the annual report, “Our preferred stock represents approximately 21 percent of our total investment in Fannie and Freddie, or about 1 percent of net assets.”

Automated appraisals may be less biased and give more accurate property value estimates, according to a new working paper by the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s Office of Policy Analysis and Research. This is especially true in rural areas where there are fewer comparable stats and more heterogeneity across homes, said the authors, Alexander Bogin and Jessica Shui. In fact, the data suggest that more than 25 percent of rural appraisals exceed the associated contract price by more than 5 percent. The study was based on GSE loan acquisitions from 2012 to 2016.Moreover, given the bias found in appraisals, some researchers have considered including automated...

Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt said he has noticed an uptick in the number of minority-owned firms active in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac transactions. Watt, speaking at the National Association of Minority Mortgage Bankers of America conference in Atlanta earlier this month, discussed the importance of diversity and inclusion in the real estate industry. He noted that although a lot of work still needs to be done, the results so far have been encouraging. “Perhaps most exciting are the results we are seeing at the financial transaction level where minority-owned firms are now involved in...

Bucking the popular notion that housing-finance reform should come with a government guarantee, a real estate professor from George Mason University suggests divvying up the risks so it’s not just on the federal government. Anthony Sanders, distinguished real estate professor in the university’s school of business, said most housing-finance reform proposals are “the same things wrapped in different color paper.” In a blog post last week, Sanders said that essentially proposals want to shut down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and open a government insurance corporation that requires an explicit guarantee at the expense of taxpayers.

Freddie Mac Announces $497M SLST. Freddie Mac announced an approximately $497 million Seasoned Loan Structured Transaction of seasoned re-performing loans from its mortgage-related investments portfolio.This will be the fourth SLST since the launch of the program in 2016 and the first SLST of 2018. It also marks the first time a Freddie-created trust will be the issuer of the SLST securitization. OIG Says FHFA Complied with Statutory Improper Payment Requirements. The Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General noted in an April 26 audit that the FHFA complied with applicable improper payment requirements during fiscal year 2017. The auditor reviewed several...

The agency share of securitized multifamily mortgages has been high since 2008…

Mel Watt has roughly eight more months in office, but already industry lobbyists and GSE watchers are playing “guess who the next FHFA director might be.”

The senator disagreed with comments made earlier in the day by HUD Deputy Secretary Pam Patenaude, who said there aren’t enough legislative days left...

A new policy change implemented by Fannie Mae will allow REITS, come May 1, to start investing in the GSE’s Connecticut Avenue Securities risk-transfer deals.