Since 2012 Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have provided the government with a hefty amount of funds thanks to the Treasury sweep of GSE profits, which could be a perverse disincentive to move forward on housing finance reform. The two government-sponsored enterprises expected to pass along a combined $9.97 billion during the first quarter of 2017, the net profits they earned in the fourth quarter that exceeded the $600 million cap on retained capital. That brings...

The government-sponsored enterprises and their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have done a lot to improve borrower access to credit, and now it is FHA’s turn to do the same, according to a new analysis by the Urban Institute. Laurie Goodman, co-director of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, noted that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the FHFA have been more successful than the FHA in reassuring lenders that they would be held liable only for underwriting errors and not for whether the borrower defaults on the loan. The GSEs and the FHFA have removed...

Stop the presses: a consensus on GSE reform is here! Really?

A former Fannie executive said it was always his belief the GSE charter allowed for multifamily financing but the idea was to fund “vertical” homes and not “horizontal.”

As one mortgage CEO noted: “We’d be knocking it out of the park already if there were more [home] sellers."

Mortgage brokers accounted for 12.9 percent of agency production.

However, this group of nonbank lender/servicers is hardly homogenous…

BAML suggested that one of the reasons prepayment speeds on jumbos have been relatively slow is the presence of self-employed borrowers…

The CFPB has fined Nationstar Mortgage $1.75 million for allegedly violating the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act by “consistently failing to report accurate data about mortgage transactions for 2012 through 2014,” the agency said. The CFPB said it found that Nationstar’s HMDA compliance systems were flawed and generated mortgage lending data with significant, preventable errors. “Nationstar also failed to maintain detailed HMDA data collection and validation procedures, and failed to implement adequate compliance procedures,” the bureau alleged. “It also produced discrepancies by failing to consistently define data among its various lines of business.” Further, data samples reviewed by the CFPB showed substantial error rates in three consecutive reporting years, the bureau said. “In the samples reviewed, the CFPB found error rates ...

Late last week, the CFPB proposed amendments to Regulation B, the implementing regulation of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, to give mortgage lenders greater flexibility in collecting information about consumer ethnicity and race. Reg B restricts lenders’ ability to ask consumers about their race, color, religion, national origin or gender, except in certain circumstances. These circumstances include required collection of the information for some mortgage applications under the regulation. Under the proposal, mortgage lenders would not have to maintain different practices depending on their loan volume or other characteristics, allowing more lenders to adopt application forms that include expanded requests for information about a consumer’s ethnicity and race, including the revised uniform residential loan application issued by government-sponsored enterprises Fannie ...