With interest rates projected to rise, lenders are putting an increased emphasis on purchase mortgages. A little-used feature in post-crisis originations could help boost purchase-mortgage originations: temporary interest rate buydowns. A temporary buydown can help increase a lender’s “market potential” by offering borrowers lower initial payments and the stability of predictable payment increases, according to Freddie Mac. Temporary buydowns generally last...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency wants to know how Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks can better help borrowers with limited English proficiency (LEP) throughout the entire mortgage cycle, from lending to servicing. With the numbers of individuals not able to speak English fluently growing in the U.S., the FHFA wants to learn more about some of the procedures and tools that originators, servicers, and other parties in the mortgage lending process currently use to help LEP borrowers. To better understand the challenges, the FHFA issued...

The GSE patch expires either in January 2021, seven years after the effective date of the ATR rule, or when the GSEs are taken out of conservatorship, whichever comes first…

The banking industry again boosted its holdings of single-family MBS during the first quarter of 2017, although results varied significantly among various major players in the market. Banks and thrifts reported $1.762 trillion in held-to-maturity and available-for-sale MBS as of the end of March, a 1.5 percent increase from the previous quarter, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking and analysis of bank call reports. With Federal Reserve MBS purchases in a holding pattern, banks and other investors are in a better position to increase their holdings as the supply of agency MBS slowly grows. The industry held...[Includes two data tables]

Much of the growth in MBS investments came from two large thrifts: Charles Schwab Bank and E*Trade Bank…

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both announced new re-performing loan sale transactions this month as the two government-sponsored enterprises look for ways to shed illiquid assets. Fannie began marketing its first re-performing loan sale back in November to help reduce its balance sheet. The program continues to gain more traction with each sale. That first sale totaled $789.2 million in unpaid principal balance. Fannie has since announced...

Insurance policies are the second-largest form of the government-sponsored enterprises’ credit-risk transfer but Fannie Mae’s Credit Insurance Risk Transfer (CIRT) program and Freddie Mac’s Agency Credit Insurance Structure (ACIS) have a few stark differences. One of the primary differences in the two is that Freddie has retained large portions of the tranches from its popular Structured Avenue Credit Risk deals (STACR), and used the ACIS program as a way to transfer some of the remaining risk, up to the 5 percent retention limit, note analysts at Wells Fargo Securities in a recent report. With ACIS coverage tied to companion STACR deals, it’s...

If Trump is successful, presumably the money would flow through to the bottom line of Fannie and Freddie and counted toward earnings.

The retail segment saw the biggest decline, dropping 34.6 percent to an estimated $221.0 billion.

For the week, IMA rolled out $3.87 billion worth of servicing auctions.