The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently stripped three mortgage lenders of their FHA Direct Endorsement (DE) approval for having default and claim rates in excess of what the department normally allows on nationwide and local levels. Prior to the termination of their DE approval, the lenders were placed on FHA Credit Watch for evaluation following an audit that uncovered their unusually high default and claim rates within the areas they serve. HUD regulations call for the termination of an FHA lender’s DE approval and origination agreement if the default and claim rate for loans endorsed within the preceding 24 months exceeds...

Ginnie Mae issuance fell both on a quarterly and year-to-year basis as new data reflect the continuing slowdown in FHA loan production, according to the Inside Mortgage Finance MBS Database. Ginnie Mae issuers combined for $149.8 billion in MBS issuance at midpoint of 2011, down 16.4 percent from the same period last year, and down 10.5 percent on a quarterly basis as MBS production dropped to $70.7 billion in the second quarter from $79.1 billion in the previous quarter. The top issuers accounted for 94.3 percent of Ginnie Mae’s total MBS output for the first six months. Of that share, 77.4 percent belonged to...

Overlooking investor overlays in mortgage loan underwriting can be quite costly and could expose lenders to regulatory risk and liability. iServe Residential Lending, a retail mortgage banker in San Diego, believes it has found the ultimate solution to its underwriting problems, especially with regards to investor overlays, including FHA, VA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. iServe, which originates conventional, government and jumbo loans, recently implemented PriceMyLoan, an automated underwriting and loan pricing tool from Insight Lending Solutions, the same folks who created TOTAL Scorecard for FHA. “PriceMyLoan is the only system that...

A new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis reveals that the proposed qualified residential mortgage standard drafted earlier this year by federal regulators would affect individual mortgage originators in dramatically different ways. As the regulators acknowledged in their proposed rule, a significant share of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans originated through 2009 would not meet new standards for loan-to-value ratios, borrower credit history, debt-to-income ratio and other factors. Most loans being sold to the government-sponsored enterprises under today’s pristine underwriting and pricing policies also would fail to meet the... [Includes one data chart]

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is working on a proposed regulation that seeks to harmonize existing standards for determining when a housing practice with a discriminatory impact violates the Fair Housing Act. The proposed rule would cover the liability standards in instances in which a racially neutral housing practice has a discriminatory effect. The disparate impact theory has been used in fair housing cases to allege discriminatory activity when the terms of a business policy are neutral toward protected classes but the policy is shown to have greater impact on minorities or other protected groups. There has been debate over...

High-risk mortgages securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continued to drag down earnings for the government-sponsored enterprises in the first quarter of 2011, forcing the two GSEs to go deeper into debt to the federal government. Fannie and Freddie lost a combined $13.0 billion on their mortgage-backed security guarantee programs during the first quarter, a significant deterioration from the $6.6 billion the GSEs lost during the previous quarter, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s latest conservatorship report. Since the beginning of 2008 through the first quarter of 2011, Fannie and Freddie have burned through...

Credit unions posted a significant increase in mortgage production volume during the first quarter of 2011, compared to the same period last year, but the industry has not yet broken through to a broader role in the market. Federally insured credit unions originated $21.5 billion in home mortgages during the first three months of the year, up 16.6 percent from a year ago, according to data from the National Credit Union Administration. But that was down 35.7 percent from the $33.5 billion that credit unions originated in the fourth quarter of 2010. The credit union share of the total mortgage market held steady at 6.6 percent of total... [Includes two data charts]

The dramatic slowdown in mortgage lending activity during the second quarter of 2011 led to significant declines in virtually all states, according to a new analysis of agency securitization data by Inside Mortgage Trends. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae securitized a total of $565.5 billion of single-family mortgages during the first six months of 2011, but much of that activity was front-loaded in the first quarter. Agency mortgage-backed securities production declined 33.7 percent from the ... [includes one data chart]

The mortgage servicing sector is warily eyeing new servicing standards cooked up by the government-sponsored enterprises at the behest of their regulator that strictly mandate the servicers’ delinquency management requirements. Some lenders dread an implementation predicament while others see opportunity. In late April, the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced its Servicing Alignment Initiative that requires Fannie and Freddie to devise uniform rules for servicing delinquent mortgages they own or ...

Bank of America said it will spend $400 million just to implement the servicing changes it agreed to in a controversial proposed settlement with a group of investors in non-agency mortgage-backed securities issued by Countrywide Financial. The proposed settlement itself would cost the bank $8.5 billion, and BofA set aside another $5.5 billion to cover other possible buyback demands. Reckoning the cost of upgrading servicing systems has been a common theme in an industry that faces even bigger expenses from punitive charges. Ally Financial this week said it will cost the company ...