Over the past couple of weeks, a battle has been brewing over the government’s response to a court order to release dozens of documents regarding the U.S. Treasury’s net worth sweep of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac profits. Plaintiffs in Fairholme Funds Inc. v. United States, et al, filed an emergency enforcement motion arguing that the government is purposely taking too long to produce the documents and requesting unnecessary extensions. Federal Claims Court Judge Margaret Sweeney ordered the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Treasury to turn over 56 documents to the plaintiff’s attorney, under seal, back in mid-September. The agencies had been...
In case you didn’t know it, the Irvine, CA-based Citadel now services roughly $650 million in nonprime loans. Angel Oak and Deephaven use subservicers…
CEO Debra Still of Pulte Mortgage blamed low usage on the fact that Fannie and Freddie use different terminology and eligibility criteria for things like area median income.
Come February 1 of next year, Fannie Mae will temporarily halt bulk transfers of mortgage servicing rights as it upgrades its reporting systems, a change the industry has known about for quite some time, but one that still promises to cause headaches. The moratorium runs from Feb. 1, 2017, through March 31, according to Fannie lender letter LL-2016-01, at a time when seller-servicers are implementing new investor reporting requirements. The government-sponsored enterprise is advising servicers that if they want to avoid disruption they “should not propose post-delivery servicing transfer effective dates that fall during” the two months. According to investment bankers that buy and sell servicing rights for a living, the moratorium can be worked...
Low-downpayment programs introduced by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac almost two years ago have been slow to gain traction. According to an Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of mortgage-backed securities data, the two government-sponsored enterprises purchased $10.31 billion of purchase mortgages with loan-to-value ratios of 96 to 97 percent during the first nine months of 2016. However, nearly half of that came in the third quarter, which saw a 52.7 percent jump from the previous period. Bob Ryan, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s division of conservatorship, said...
Don’t expect any rapid changes to the charters of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. After all, GSE reform is hard. At least that’s the message of some market watchers.
In a Trump administration it's possible Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would would face more competition and have less of an economic edge over non-GSE rivals, said Cowen & Co.
RSS