The Department of Veterans Affairs will continue removing barriers to delivering home-loan benefits to veterans and service members in 2015, focusing more on further improvements in appraisal and servicing. “It’s going to be geared around improving on the things we have already done,” said Mike Frueh, director of the VA Home Loan Guaranty program. VA loan originations are on the upswing and the agency wants to maintain the trend by getting more vets and active-duty personnel into the program. Last year, 18 percent of VA loans were to active-duty service members and 82 percent to veterans. Frueh said the VA program is by far the better deal. Interest rates are lower on a VA loan than on conventional loans and, generally requires no downpayment, he noted. In addition, VA loans do not have mortgage insurance. Based on the volume of VA loans originated in 2014, veteran borrowers ...
The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of the Inspector General has finalized settlements with two direct endorsement lenders to resolve allegations of violating FHA underwriting requirements. Golden First Mortgage Corp. and Group One Mortgage agreed to pay a total of $36.41 million to the federal government in reparation for losses incurred by the FHA on the defaulted loans. Based in Great Neck, NY, Golden First, a privately held company, and its owner/president, David Movtady, allegedly falsely certified to FHA and HUD that the loans the company endorsed for insurance met all FHA requirements. This went on from 2002 through 2010, the OIG alleged. The OIG accused the company and Movtady of violating the False Claims Act, which prohibits acts to defraud the federal government and which has been instrumental in ...
The Department of Veterans Affairs is updating its residual-income tables, with an eye to publishing revised guidelines in 2016. The last time the VA calculated and published the residual-income guidelines was in the 1990s, and a lot has changed since then, according to Mike Frueh, director of the VA Home Loan Guaranty program. Residual income is the monthly household income that remains after all primary obligations – mortgage and escrows, car payments, credit card bills, student loans, among others – have been paid. VA will not back a loan to a vet or service member if they do not meet or exceed residual-income requirements. The residual-income threshold varies by family size, borrower location and other compensating factors. Calculations for residual income vary for the Northwest Region, Midwest Region, South Region and West Region of the country. Frueh said they are ...
Beginning June 27, the FHA will require electronic appraisals for single-family forward and reverse mortgages to be delivered through an online electronic submission portal prior to endorsement. The Electronic Appraisal Delivery (EAD) portal is a web-based platform that would allow paperless submissions of single-family home loan appraisals, cutting down loan processing time significantly. FHA lenders and their authorized representatives can access the EAD portal by using electronic credentials and showing they are ready to use the new technology. Only appraisals that are compliant with FHA appraisal and data delivery guidelines can be uploaded to the portal. Lenders will be notified of a successful upload or if they need to correct and resubmit an appraisal. Once an appraisal is successfully submitted to the portal, FHA Connection will pull EAD appraisal data and pre-fill certain data fields in the ...
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Program has fully automated the submission of loan-origination documents and the electronic issuance of conditional commitments. This means that RHS’s Guaranteed Underwriting System (GUS), which is used for underwriting single-family rural home loans, has gone paperless, beginning March 28, 2015. Over the past year, USDA Rural Development has implemented changes to streamline and modernize the guaranteed loan program. In December last year, the RHS modified its lender loan-closing system to allow electronic issuance of loan note guarantees. Under the streamlined document-submission process for GUS requests, lenders will upload all required origination documents into GUS following a final submission. This enables lenders to avoid encrypting and emailing docs to USDA. After receiving the docs, GUS will alert the ...
Fannie Mae Updates Reverse Mortgage Loan Servicing Manual. Fannie Mae has updated its reverse mortgage servicing manual with changes and clarifications to policies pertaining to Home Equity Conversion Mortgages. For HECMs, Fannie now requires servicers to place a real estate-owned hazard insurance policy upon completion of a foreclosure sale. It also outlined servicers’ responsibilities regarding the documentation and cancellation of REO hazard insurance claims; reimbursement of REO hazard insurance premiums; and remittance of insurance loss proceeds. The revised policy changes must be implemented no later than April 1, 2015. House Democrats Reintroduce Housing Finance Reform Bill. Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee have introduced legislation that would provide private and government risk-share coverage to all mortgages, create a ...
If preapproval letters from certain lenders are routinely unreliable, real estate agents tend to suggest that homebuyers apply for a mortgage with a different lender, according to new research by Campbell Surveys, based on a national survey sponsored by Inside Mortgage Finance Publications. “Agents are sometimes skeptical of mortgage providers selected without their consultation,” said Tom Popik, research director of Campbell Surveys. Before working with a potential homebuyer, real estate agents largely prefer...
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