Soon both GSEs will offer property inspection waivers as part of an effort to reduce lender uncertainty when it comes to buybacks. Freddie Mac is set to introduce its appraisal waiver within the next few months and Fannie Mae has had one since December. Appraisals are often the leading cause of buyback concerns, according to Allen Maulsby, executive vice president at Colonial National Mortgage. He told Inside The GSEs that Fannie and Freddie are moving in the right direction when it comes to addressing buyback relief. “Anything that they can do to give us rep-and-warrant relief is good. I think it probably has alleviated some repurchase anxiety, particularly around appraisals,” he said.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency late last month published its annual GSE Scorecard progress report and noted that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have made great strides in meeting their conservatorship goals, including increasing access to mortgage credit and reducing taxpayer risks. Many of the objectives set by the scorecard were focused on testing new concepts or perfecting existing ones, and relatively few of them had hard targets in terms of business volume. The first highlighted strategic goal for the GSEs was maintaining credit availability, including increasing access to credit. There hasn’t been much change in the credit profile of Fannie and Freddie business, and the regulator did not set any specific goals other than the affordable housing goals.
The Community Home Lenders Association proposed a GSE reform plan last week using a utility that would let Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac build capital and would release the GSEs back into the private sector. Unlike most of the reform proposals that have been floated in the past year, the trade group for community-based mortgage lenders suggests recapitalizing and reprivatizing the GSEs with the mindset that comprehensive legislation is not needed at this time. Its plan calls for a capital restoration and uses a utility model that it suggests the Federal Housing Finance Agency develop, with the Treasury’s and Congress’ blessings. CHLA said that the FHFA is the appropriate entity to develop such a plan with...
The GSEs increased their credit-risk transfers by 30.4 percent in 2016 from the previous year. This means that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both hit their risk-transfer targets by executing different forms of CRTs that covered $548.0 billion of mortgages, according to a recent report from the Federal Housing Finance Agency.“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have made credit risk transfer a regular part of their business and they continue to improve and expand the scope of their programs and explore different transaction structures,” said FHFA Director Melvin Watt. The FHFA directed the GSEs to transfer credit risk on 90 percent of their targeted business: long-term, fixed-rate mortgages with loan-to-value ratios exceeding 60 percent.
Freddie Mac’s vice president of single-family business transformation is one of five industry innovators honored by the Mortgage Bankers Association with an MBA Insights Tech All-Star Award recognizing industry leaders who have made outstanding contributions in mortgage technology.
As first quarters go, the start to 2017 was relatively strong, but total issuance was down sharply from the previous period, a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis and ranking reveals. The market produced a total of $394.08 billion of residential MBS and non-mortgage ABS during the first three months of 2017, an 18.5 percent decline from the fourth quarter of last year. Production, however, was up 23.7 percent from the same period a year ago, and it was the strongest start since the first quarter of 2013, when agency mortgage refinance activity was running white-hot. In 2017, the agency MBS sector is...[Includes three data tables]
Single-family rental operator Invitation Homes expects to enter into its previously announced $1 billion financing agreement with Fannie Mae sometime in the second quarter, using the net proceeds to pay down loans racked up while issuing MBS. According to an update provided in a new 10-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Invitation – which went public earlier in the year – will “repay all remaining amounts outstanding under our mortgage loan relating to the IH1 2014-1 securitization and approximately $529.0 million of our mortgage loan relating to the IH1 2014-2 securitization.” Grubstaked by The Blackstone Group, IH has been...
Despite rumors to the contrary, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac forked over most of their fourth-quarter earnings to the Treasury Department at the end of March, as scheduled. But some industry insiders wonder whether the timing of future payments will be altered to reduce the likelihood that either of the government-sponsored enterprises might need another bailout. In early March, there were talks predicting, or hoping for everything from a possible suspension of the Treasury sweep to replacing the quarterly payment with an annual one. Speculation may have been fueled by uncertainty about what the Trump administration wants to do about the now eight-year-old conservatorships of the two GSEs. In 2017, Fannie and Freddie can only retain...
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