The House of Representatives appears ready to pass the Senate’s regulatory relief bill sometime this month while still planning to push for more revisions to the Dodd-Frank Act.

Sen. Mike Crapo, R-ID, chair of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, isn’t giving up on housing-finance reform in 2018, even though many industry observers already have. He said it’s still a “high priority,” while speaking at the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Advocacy conference in Washington this week. Crapo disagreed with comments made earlier in the day by Housing and Urban Development Deputy Secretary Pam Patenaude, who said there aren’t enough legislative days left to do GSE reform this go around. And he was adamant in saying he’s not ruling out the possibility of reform happening in this Congress.

Bucking the popular notion that housing-finance reform should come with a government guarantee, a real estate professor from George Mason University suggests divvying up the risks so it’s not just on the federal government. Anthony Sanders, distinguished real estate professor in the university’s school of business, said most housing-finance reform proposals are “the same things wrapped in different color paper.” In a blog post last week, Sanders said that essentially proposals want to shut down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and open a government insurance corporation that requires an explicit guarantee at the expense of taxpayers.

Mel Watt has roughly eight more months remaining as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, but already the industry is beginning to worry about what possible changes his successor might make to the operations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The Mortgage Bankers Association this week called upon its members to tailor their state advocacy and lobbying strategies to whatever opportunities they see in the increasingly incendiary political environment.

The number of taxpayers taking the mortgage interest deduction this year will decline by more than 50 percent compared with 2017, according to new estimates from the federal government. The mortgage interest deduction will be a lot less useful due to a large increase to the standard deduction.

Legislation was introduced this week in the House Financial Services Committee that would strengthen oversight of FHA mortgage servicers to ensure their compliance with the agency’s loss-mitigation requirements. The FHA Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2018 (H.R. 5555) would require the Department of Housing and Urban Development to conduct servicer oversight, including sampling, compliance reviews, and direct information collection from borrowers whose files were sampled. “A decade after the devastating foreclosure crisis, we continue to see significant problems with the servicing of FHA loans that unnecessarily put homeowners at risk of foreclosure,” said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, ranking member on the committee and sponsor of the bill. Waters said her bill would ensure that FHA servicers help families experiencing financial hardships avoid foreclosure so that they can ...

The latest update on the single security may signify the next step in GSE reform, according to analysts with Wells Fargo Securities. In late March, the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced that the uniform mortgage-backed security collateralized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans will launch on June 3, 2019. The framework for housing-finance reform has evolved over time to building on the successful elements of the current market instead of disrupting it, said analysts Vipul Jain, Anish Lohokare and Randy Ahlgren. They noted that the single security seems to be leading toward a single MBS label with catastrophic insurance underwritten explicitly by the government.

Fannie Mae Announces New Board Member. Christopher Herbert was elected as a director on the company’s board of directors. The GSE noted that he has extensive experience relating to housing policy and urban development. He’s been managing director for Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies since January 2015. The Final Nail in the GSE Reform Coffin: Creation of the $3B Capital Buffer? Although GSE reform appears to be dead in the current Congress, Fitch Ratings issued a report Tuesday predicting that MBS guarantors created in the future to replace Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will be on solid ground financially. As for why GSE reform failed, Fitch contends...

Home-price increases continued uninterrupted in early 2018 despite predictions by some industry analysts that tax reform enacted in December could have a negative impact on the housing market. Analysts add that the full impact of tax reform has yet to play out, though early returns look promising.