Industry observers are weighing in on the redesigned Uniform Residential Loan Application, an industry standard that has largely remained the same for the past 20 years, until now. The GSEs published the new form last week to give lenders ample time to get familiar with it. The updated form won’t officially be in use until Jan. 1, 2018. The URLA is for single-family loans submitted to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae, as well as mortgages insured by the FHA, VA or U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Services. The redesigned form falls under the larger Federal Housing Finance Agency and GSE initiative to standardize single-family mortgage data in the U.S.
Proponents of the mortgage interest tax deduction point out that the real estate and mortgage industries employ thousands upon thousands of workers with spillover to other sectors...
One former GSE executive lost his severance package case and another settled in a long-standing civil fraud lawsuit. Both cases came to a conclusion last week. Anthony Piszel, former chief financial officer at Freddie Mac, appealed a judgment from the U.S. Court of Federal Claims dismissing his complaint that Freddie owed him payment for his “golden parachute” compensation after he was terminated without cause at the start of the conservatorship. The question came down to whether or not a government prohibition on making golden parachute payments to terminated Freddie employees was illegal or not. Piszel was terminated two weeks after...
FHFA’s TCPA Exemption Request Denied. The Federal Communications Commission turned down the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s request to exempt GSE mortgage servicing calls from prohibitions against robocalls, or automated dialing and calling systems, to contact delinquent borrowers. It refused the request, citing the exemption for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans “because little in the way of facts has been entered into the record.” According to the commission, the FHFA, in its request, cites two different exemption provisions. However, the FCC said the FHFA failed to provide the information necessary for determining whether the calls at issue would satisfy the threshold requirements for exemption. Under the rule, calls to cell phones are capped at no more than three attempts...
The Federal Housing Finance Agency revealed details this week on a new high loan-to-value streamlined refinance option for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages that will replace the Home Affordable Refinance Program. HARP was due to sunset at the end of this year, but the FHFA extended it until Sept. 30, 2017, with the new alternative beginning immediately after. The as-yet-unnamed option is...
Credit Suisse sold two warehouse facility-backed securities this week totaling $800.0 million, according to Moody’s Investors Service. The rating service placed A2 ratings on the Mortgage Repurchase Agreement Financing Trust Series 2016-1 and Series 2016-2 transactions. Much like a warehouse facility security issued by Jefferies in May, Moody’s said the MRAFT securities are structured with two legs of “back to back” repurchase agreements. The first leg consists...
A total of $333.1 billion of residential MBS backed by freshly originated home loans were issued during the second quarter of 2016, a 30.3 percent increase over the first three months of the year. But that trailed the 34.2 percent surge in primary-market originations during the same period. The result was a further decline in the mortgage securitization rate, from 67.3 percent in the first quarter to 65.3 percent in the second, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. It marked the lowest securitization rate since 2004, when the non-agency MBS market was just beginning to take off. The biggest decline was...[Includes one data table]
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