Hurricane Sandy homeowners with FHA and VA mortgages have been given temporary relief, including a 90-day suspension on foreclosures and as much as 100 percent financing for victims who have lost their homes. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Veterans Affairs have announced federal disaster assistance to hard-hit areas in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey. Both agencies announced a three-month freeze on foreclosures in the affected areas as well as forbearance on foreclosures of FHA and VA home loans. The VA advised its lenders that careful counseling should ...

GSEs, Private MIs Agree to Drop Pre-Approval Requirements. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the private mortgage insurance industry have agreed to eliminate pre-approval requirements for foreclosure alternatives, such as short sales and deeds-in-lieu of foreclosure. The separate agreements with MIs should help distressed homeowners avoid foreclosure by doing away with costly, time-consuming MI reviews that delay foreclosure-prevention transactions, according to the government-sponsored enterprises. WIMC Fully Acquires Reverse Mortgage Solutions. Walter Investment Management Corp. has completed its $120 million acquisition of ...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac this week reported a combined $4.74 billion in net income during the third quarter, as the two government-sponsored enterprises avoided taking further draws from the Treasury Department by staying in positive earnings territory. The GSEs’ combined third-quarter income was down 41.7 percent from the previous three-month period, mostly because Fannie’s net income fell 64.6 percent from second-quarter earnings that were pumped up by a $3.04 billion recorded benefit on credit losses. Fannie’s $1.81 billion in third-quarter net income was much more in line with the $2.72 billion it earned in the first three months of the year, as well as Freddie’s recent performance. Freddie reported...

With third-quarter earnings results right around the corner for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Finance Agency last week released a revised range of projected draw-downs the GSEs could take from the U.S. Treasury over the next three years. Fannie’s and Freddie’s total taxpayer cash infusion could top as much as $209 billion by the end of 2015 – a “savings” of more than $100 billion from similar projections one year ago, according to the Finance Agency.

The government’s civil mortgage fraud lawsuit filed last week against Bank of America and Countrywide Financial for allegedly scheming to defraud Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could have serious adverse consequences for the industry going forward, according to an industry attorney. Filed by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the government contends that since the U.S. Treasury has been forced to bail out the two GSEs, losses suffered by Fannie and Freddie can be recovered under the False Claims Act – a federal law that provides for treble damages and penalties. Laurence Platt, financial services practice leader at K&L Gates, warned participants during an Inside Mortgage Finance webinar that the government’s lawsuit against BofA and others like it sure to follow, threatens to turn “every low-level rep and warranty” with Fannie or Freddie into a federal case.

With most precincts now having reported third-quarter earnings, the outcome is clear: mortgage banking was hugely profitable during the third quarter of 2012. A new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of earnings reports from 25 public companies reveals record mortgage banking income of $9.903 billion during the third quarter. That was a huge 19.2 percent increase over the hefty $8.311 billion these companies earned from their mortgage banking activities during the second quarter ... [Includes one data chart]

An entity affiliated with Ocwen Financial and Walter Investment Management separately initiated financing schemes around the time the two companies joined to bid on the mortgage assets of the bankrupt Residential Capital. Ocwen and Walter last week won a ResCap auction with a joint bid of $3.0 billion, including $540.0 million from Walter. The companies noted that ResCap was servicing $374 billion in unpaid principal balance as of the end of the first quarter of 2012, including a significant amount of ...

Mortgage brokers have made a comeback and a number of new buyers have stepped into the correspondent market – with the common theme of a stronger focus on loan quality. Wholesale lenders have become more selective, said Matthew Young, a senior vice president at Genworth Mortgage Insurance, during a panel session at the Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention in Chicago last week. Buyer attitudes in the correspondent market have been shaped by the risk of mortgage buybacks, which have led to ...

It looks like many banks may have been too distracted with loan modifications, foreclosures and regulatory compliance issues over the last few years to notice a potentially vast untapped well of profit in their own back yards. A new consumer mortgage study finds that banks are passing by an opportunity to increase their mortgage business by a whopping 79 percent with their existing customer base. “Thirty-nine percent of survey respondents have their mortgage with their primary bank, the bank with which they do ...

Regulations arising from the Dodd-Frank Act and Basel III capital standards would result in fewer mortgage loans made, tighter lending standards, reduced home sales, fewer jobs and slower economic growth, warned a new study from the American Action Forum, a policy think tank in Washington, DC. In particular, the AAF said that taken as a whole, the finalized rules on qualified mortgages and qualified residential mortgages,as well as Basel provisions requiring banks to hold more capital for certain risk-weighted ...