The government-sponsored enterprises and their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have done a lot to improve borrower access to credit, and now it is FHA’s turn to do the same, according to a new analysis by the Urban Institute. Laurie Goodman, co-director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, noted that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHFA have been more successful than the FHA in reassuring lenders that they would be held liable only for underwriting errors and not for whether the borrower defaults on the loan. The GSEs and the FHFA have removed...

Stop the presses: a consensus on GSE reform is here! Really?

A former Fannie executive said it was always his belief the GSE charter allowed for multifamily financing but the idea was to fund “vertical” homes and not “horizontal.”

The most prevalent users of next-gen tech were large and mid-sized lenders…

The Trump administration appears to be in no rush to fill key posts at HUD, Ginnie Mae and FHA...

Mortgage brokers accounted for 12.9 percent of agency production.

During the fourth quarter of 2016, lenders repurchased just $207.31 million of home loans, a 37.0 percent decline from the third quarter.

Issues involving regulatory compliance have declined significantly under the Trump administration.

Mortgage lenders that sell loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac saw a huge drop in the volume of repurchases and other indemnifications in 2016, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis of disclosure reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. During the fourth quarter of 2016, lenders repurchased just $207.31 million of home loans, a 37.0 percent decline from the third quarter. That brought total repurchases to $1.101 billion last year, down 35.9 percent from 2015. Those are record lows in the contentious recent history of GSE buyback demands. Fannie and Freddie, along with other “asset securitizers,” began filing quarterly repurchase reports with the SEC in early...

Vice President Mike Pence’s chief economist said the Trump administration is working on GSE reform principles. The comments came this week during a government relations summit hosted by the American Bankers Association. Mark Calabria, former director of financial regulation studies at the Cato Institute, caused a media frenzy when during a general session he said that a “set of principles” on GSE reform is likely to emerge in the coming months. Calabria is not a proponent of the GSEs, and believes that without Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, commercial banks would step in to fill the liquidity void for the simple reason they have so much in the way of “excess reserves.”