Franklin American Mortgage has relaxed and removed many of its overlays across the company’s portfolio of products, including revising the minimum FICO credit score down by 20 points on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans. The company said it wants to more closely align its policies with current agency requirements for loans sold to the government-sponsored enterprises and insured by the FHA and VA. Franklin revised...

Credit Suisse this week issued a $91.2 million non-agency MBS backed by seasoned FHA mortgages. CSMC 2017-FHA1 marked the first non-agency securitization of re-performing FHA mortgages since 2010. The deal received an A rating from DBRS and an A1 rating from Moody’s Investors Service with subordination of 16.50 percent on the senior tranche. Moody’s cited a number of credit “challenges,” including uncertainty about FHA insurance payouts for liquidated mortgages, insufficient information on loan modifications and weak representations and warranties. The mortgages in the deal have...

The credit landscape is improving as more lenders introduce new credit-scoring mechanisms and eligibility requirements, but it may not mean much for mortgage origination volume, at least in the short term, according to a new study by mortgage consulting firm the Stratmor Group. The study noted that when faced with slower housing growth due to demographics, affordability, and higher healthcare costs, lenders will look to loosen underwriting standards to feed their production capacity. Rob Chrisman, senior advisor with Stratmor, said many of the “good borrowers” have refinanced and bought homes already, leaving lenders with borrowers of lesser credit quality. “Lenders and investors, too, are...

Nonbanks and fintech firms have made major in-roads in mortgage originations and now account for a significant chunk of the market and are continuing to expand through regulatory arbitrage, according to analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. Discussing the so-called disruptors in the mortgage market during a recent podcast, Bose George, chief of mortgage research at KBW, and Brian Gardner, KBW’s senior policy analyst, reported that nonbanks now originate 38 percent of all ...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau last week announced it will assess the effectiveness of its ability-to-repay/qualified-mortgage rule, as per the requirements of the Dodd-Frank Act, and is asking for public input. The CFPB will examine the impact of major provisions of the rule on mortgage costs, origination volumes, approval rates and subsequent loan performance. A special focus is on self-employed borrowers, those with seasonal or part-time income and borrowers with income from assets. Another topic for review is...

FHA liability standards, Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) lien guidance, downpayment assistance and revised condominium rules are among the regulations industry groups would like the Department of Housing and Urban Development to change or clarify. HUD is putting together an internal task force to identify regulations for review and to assess their compliance costs and regulatory burden. The department also has published a notice of the undertaking in the Federal Register with a request for comment. The comment period ends on June 14, 2017. President Trump issued an executive order in January directing federal agencies to identify at least two prior regulations for elimination for every new regulation they issue. The Mortgage Bankers Association is seeking clarification of FHA liability standards to entice banks to resume their FHA lending. The group thinks HUD’s new defect taxonomy ...

VA originations saw a significant drop during the first three months of 2017 as refinancing continued to slow, according to an Inside FHA/VA Lending analysis of agency data. Lenders closed $42.9 billion of VA loans in the first quarter, down 28.1 percent from the previous quarter The numbers show purchase mortgages continued to drive VA originations. A slowdown in VA refinancing appears to be the key factor in the decline. Refis accounted for 27.7 percent of total VA production, down from the fourth quarter of 2016. A change in Ginnie Mae’s pooling rules aimed at discouraging churning has taken much of the steam out of the once-booming VA refi segment. The steep drop in volume ended an upward quarter-to-quarter trend in VA originations last year. Eight of the top 10 VA lenders saw huge quarter-over-quarter declines in their VA lending, with top-ranked Freedom Mortgage posting the largest ... [ Charts ]

The Financial Services Roundtable called for changes to FHA’s legal liability standards to encourage banks to make more FHA loans. Increased risks of False Claims Act enforcement and concerns about multi-million dollar penalties even for the slightest underwriting errors have forced banks to restrict their FHA lending. The top 10 FHA lenders, once dominated by banks, are now nondepository institutions, which accounted for 83 percent of FHA forward originations in the first quarter of 2017. Wells Fargo, once the leader in FHA lending, has dropped to a woeful 20th place in the rankings. “Some federal officials have expressed concern about the capacity of the government to evaluate the qualifications of lenders that are not subject to regulation by federal agencies,” the FSR said. The group also noted the credit overlays many FHA lenders have added to the loans due to ...

The Mortgage Bankers Association is pushing back against a controversial budget proposal to charge FHA lenders a fee to pay for technology upgrades to help protect the Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund. Rather than charging lenders an “administrative fee,” the MBA prefers that funding improvements to FHA’s aging information systems be done through the appropriations process. “We need to be working with [the Department of Housing and Urban Development] and Congress to find ways to fund technology upgrades and risk-management improvements,” MBA Senior Vice President Pete Mills told Inside FHA/VA Lending. The White House’s budget plan for FY 2018 incorporates verbatim a proposal by the Obama administration to charge FHA lenders an administrative fee to support the upgrades needed to reduce MMI Fund losses. According to the previous administration’s estimate, the ...

False Claims Act enforcement against FHA lenders appears to have slowed with no new cases being filed by the Department of Justice or referred by the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general for nearly a year. Neither agency has gone after any lender for alleged False Claims Act violations since May of last year when the Department of Justice intervened in an FCA case brought by a whistleblower against Guild Mortgage, an FHA direct endorsement lender. The complaint alleged that San Diego-based Guild Mortgage knowingly approved loans that violated FHA rules while falsely certifying compliance with those rules. The alleged violations occurred between 2006 and 2011, resulting in “tens of millions of dollars” in losses to HUD. The case is pending in federal district court in Washington, DC. Indications are the FCA cases involving FHA lenders have ...