The Federal Housing Finance Agency should direct Fannie Mae to strengthen its control over the GSE’s short sales, and review Fannie’s Streamlined Documentation Program to determine whether it should be available to borrowers seeking approval to short sell non-owner-occupied properties, according to the agency’s official watchdog. The audit released this week by the FHFA’s Office of Inspector General was based on a review of 41 short-sale transactions involving multiple Fannie servicers.

Freddie Mac announced last week that Arch Reinsurance will provide credit-loss insurance to the GSE on a pool of mortgages used in the company’s first non-agency risk-sharing transaction. The $22.58 billion pool was used to create tranches sold to investors as part of Freddie’s first Structured Agency Credit Risk transaction. Arch will cover up to $77.4 million in losses on certain tranches of the deal. The STACR deal was structured so that Freddie will take the first 30 basis points of losses on the transaction, followed by private investors, which bought debt notes on the following 300 basis points of potential losses.

Justice Department lawyers want to extract the largest possible penalty from Bank of America after a Charlotte, NC, jury found in October that its Countrywide Financial Corp. division committed fraud when it sold toxic mortgages to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, according to court papers filed earlier this month.In its successful civil suit against BofA, the DOJ and the Securities and Exchange Commission estimated that the two GSEs lost some $850 million from thousands of loans acquired through CFC’s “Hustle” program between August 2007 and May 2008. BofA acquired Countrywide in 2008 and is liable for the fraud.

Borrowers who refinanced during the three-month period ending Sept. 30 will save approximately $6.0 billion in interest over the next 12 months, Freddie Mac said in its third-quarter refinance report Tuesday. The GSE’s refi report – which is compiled from data on sample properties in which Freddie has funded two successive conventional, first-mortgage loans, with the second being a refinancing – found that 37 percent of refi borrowers shortened their loan term. This was up 5 percent from the previous quarter and the highest since 1992, the report said.

Freddie Launches Broker Training Program to Boost REO Sales. Freddie Mac announced this week it has launched a new program to train real estate agents how to better move real estate-owned homes through its HomeSteps sales unit. Freddie’s new Certified Community Stabilization Expert program is an eight-hour online course developed by San Diego-based Community Asset Solutions to teach the latest lessons for selling REO homes, according to Chris Bowden, senior vice president, HomeSteps. The CCSE program curriculum is designed to help real estate professionals “work more effectively with nonprofits and local governments, take advantage of public initiatives for maintaining properties and create new outreach efforts for owner-occupant buyers, especially low- and moderate-income homebuyers,” said Bowden.

A significant but continued decline in GSE refinance activity helped contribute to an overall dip in the volume of single-family mortgages securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in October, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. Fannie and Freddie issued $67.7 billion in single-family mortgage-backed securities in October, a 13.8 percent decline from September but a 2.9 percent rise for the first 10 months of 2013. Deliveries of refinance loans to Fannie and Freddie have declined steadily since January.

So far this year, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have resolved some $30.99 billion of buyback demands through a combination of loan repurchases and indemnifications for the GSEs’ losses, nearly double the $15.66 billion in resolutions recorded during the first nine months of 2012, according to an analysis by Inside Mortgage Trends, an affiliated publication. The figures refer to the unpaid principal balance of loans subject to a repurchase demand, not the actual payment by the lender. Fannie and Freddie reported a combined $3.53 billion of mortgage repurchases and other buyback resolutions during the third quarter of 2013, the lowest quarterly amount in three years.

Retail mortgage-production units accounted for 63.0 percent of new originations during the third quarter of 2013, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside Mortgage Finance. That was up slightly from a 62.8 percent retail share of new production during the second quarter, and it represented one of the highest levels of retail-channel dominance ever. The share of retail originations has soared over the past few years as many major lenders have scaled back their broker and correspondent operations. But all three production channels showed...[Includes four data charts]

A publicly traded real estate investment trust is the buyer of Fannie Mae MSRs offered by CashCall, investment banking sources said.

Private-equity firms such as Pershing Square Capital Management and Fairholme Funds are gobbling up the common and preferred shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a trend that may continue as long as the two stay profitable and Congress dithers with how to end their conservatorships. “There’s some value there,” said Brian Harris, a senior analyst with Moody’s Investors Service. “The hedge funds believe the two will continue to earn money.” Industry observers who closely follow the government-sponsored enterprises predict...