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 ...

A company called NotaryCam is raising eyebrows – and hopes for the future of e-mortgages – with the deployment of what it claims is the world’s only notary service that securely and legally notarizes documents online within minutes via live web conference from anywhere in the world. Requiring just a standard webcam, NotaryCam, based in Alexandria, VA, can produce a digital version of notarized documents within minutes. And with browser-to-browser ...

Real estate agents prefer to work with lenders that have a local presence, but call-center operations have improved their reputations among agents, according to new research by Campbell Surveys, based on a national survey sponsored by Inside Mortgage Finance Publications. “Survey results show that Quicken Loans’ call-center model can be an accepted alternative to the local branch/local loan officer model, at least for some homebuyers and real estate agents ...

Loan Modification Trial Payment Plans for Forward Mortgages. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced requirements for trial plan duration, required signatures, and reporting for trial payment-plan agreements, and the conditions under which FHA deems a TPP to have failed.Lenders must implement the requirements in Mortgagee Letter 2015-07 for all TPPs offered to borrowers on or after June 1, 2015. FHA Publishes Additional Sections of HUD Single-Family Policy Handbook. The FHA has published additional sections for the SF Handbook, including the following: Doing Business with FHA – Lenders and Mortgagees Doing Business with FHA – Other participants in FHA Transactions – Appraisers; Quality Control, Oversight and Compliance – Lenders and Mortgagees; Quality Control Oversight, and Compliance – Other Participants in FHA Transactions – Appraisers ...

The CFPB seems to be spending quite a bit of time defending its "rate checker" tool, which is still in beta testing.

KBW, by the way, has set a $1 per share price target for both Fannie and Freddie.

Issuers and other participants in future structured-finance deals will face a higher hurdle of data quality expectations from Moody’s Investors Service, according to a new credit rating methodology the company put out this week. An important part of the initial rating analysis that Moody’s will perform of a structured security is an evaluation of the attributes of the assets that underlie it, the document said. “In assessing those characteristics, we typically use...

Treasury counselor Michael Stegman wants the common securitization platform project to be opened to the private sector.

In less than 10 months, a volume-heavy private-label origination deal that PHH Mortgage has with Wall Street giant Merrill Lynch is set to expire, potentially blowing a hole in its production machine. According to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, PHH acknowledges that “there can be no assurances that the agreement will be renewed on favorable terms, if at all.” If the deal were to be cancelled, PHH could see...