Fannie Mae will now allow rental payments from Airbnb properties to be used as income when refinancing a home. In a new initiative with Airbnb and three financial institutions, lenders can consider home-sharing income earned on borrowers’ properties when applying to refinance their primary residence mortgage. Prior to this initiative, lenders usually wouldn’t consider income from renting out a home or rooms in a home as a part of a borrower’s regular income stream. Airbnb hosts can apply to refinance their mortgages with Quicken Loans, Citizen Bank or Better Mortgage and have that earnings counted.

Freddie Mac CEO Donald Layton said that home prices have been reasonably strong over the past five years or so, but a new construction lag is what’s really contributing to the lack of affordable housing.He also said there’s been a noticeably higher rate of home price growth than in average or median family income. Layton said, in the long-term, the U.S. has produced 1.5 million housing units a year, both multifamily and single-family. And with a small population growth adjustment, Layton said it should be about 1.6 million a year now. “I believe it has noticeably declined in the financial crisis and it has never returned to that level again,” he said in a phone interview.

Fannie Mae re-entered the low-income housing tax credit market and this month closed on a $100 million fund focused on supporting affordable multifamily housing in hurricane-ravaged communities. The GSE collaborated with Raymond James Tax Credit Funds to create the fund. After being absent from the LIHTC market for almost a decade, Fannie closed on the fund on Feb. 5 and said it’s now part of an ongoing effort to provide a reliable source of capital for affordable rental housing and underserved markets. The Federal Housing Finance Agency announced late in the fourth quarter that both Fannie and Freddie Mac are allowed to re-enter the LIHTC market but with limitations so they’re not in direct competition with the private market.

At $600K a Year, Fannie Mae CEO Tim Mayopoulos is Underpaid. Although Fannie Mae reported pre-tax income of $18.4 billion in 2017, its CEO Timothy Mayopoulos took home, once again, a base salary of roughly $600,000, the limit for both GSE CEOs and a figure that seems exceedingly low when compared to financial services firms of similar size. A new 10-K filing from the company notes: “Our chief executive officer’s compensation in 2017 was more than 90 percent below the market median for comparable firms. Our inability to offer market-based compensation hinders our succession planning for our chief executive officer role, and potentially our ability to hire...

JPMorgan Chase and U.S. Bancorp each took different routes in shrinking their MBS portfolios…

Suffice to say, Fannie and Freddie are two cash cows that only a crazy person would eliminate, unless that crazy person doesn’t like money…

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this week reported a combined loss of $9.4 billion for the fourth quarter of 2017, a direct result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and its impact on their deferred tax assets. The two government-sponsored enterprises had to reduce the value of the DTA by $10.2 billion.

All totaled, the new tax law will result in Treasury – which owns the senior preferred stock of the GSEs – forking over $4.01 billion to aid Fannie and Freddie...

Prior to release of 4Q17 results, the GSEs had an “account balance” of $103.0 billion with Uncle Sam: $291.4 billion of dividends paid to Treasury versus $188.4 billion of assistance received.

No one has suggested publicly that Mayopoulos is unhappy with his pay, but in a new 10-K filing, Fannie worries that...