Industry observers are weighing in on the redesigned Uniform Residential Loan Application, an industry standard that has largely remained the same for the past 20 years, until now. The GSEs published the new form last week to give lenders ample time to get familiar with it. The updated form won’t officially be in use until Jan. 1, 2018. The URLA is for single-family loans submitted to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae, as well as mortgages insured by the FHA, VA or U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Services. The redesigned form falls under the larger Federal Housing Finance Agency and GSE initiative to standardize single-family mortgage data in the U.S.
HUD has been criticized by consumer advocates who feel the agency's NPL auctions have unfairly benefitted private equity firms and hedge funds at the expense of troubled borrowers.
Lender buybacks of mortgages sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may never completely disappear, but they are shrinking fast – especially when compared to soaring new business volume at the two government-sponsored enterprises. A new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis reveals that lenders repurchased, or made other indemnification, some $250.1 million of loans during the second quarter of 2016. That was the lowest quarterly ... [Includes two data charts]
While Fannie Mae has mopped up virtually all of the buyback disputes on loans more than a few years old, Freddie Mac still has a stubborn supply of legacy repurchase demands on its hands. A new Inside The GSEs analysis of repurchase activity disclosures for the second quarter of 2016 reveals that 39.6 percent of Freddie’s pending and disputed buyback claims involved loans that were securitized prior to 2008. At Fannie, such loans accounted for just 0.7 percent of unresolved buyback demands as of the end of June. Freddie did make progress during the second quarter, however. In fact, 34.8 percent of the seller repurchases or indemnifications made during the...
The GSEs recently introduced a new loan dispute procedure that lenders should use prior to engaging a third-party arbitrator. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac launched their independent dispute resolution process early in the year as the final piece to the representation-and-warranties framework to help prevent buybacks.This process uses a neutral third-party arbitrator to determine a final, binding decision about whether there was a loan violation.However, the new impasse and management escalation process, announced last week, is intended to serve as an intermediary between the normal loan dispute appeal process and the final IDR process for seller/servicers.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will implement a new high loan-to-value refinance option in October 2017 to replace the Home Affordable Refinance Program but lenders say it’s too early to know what to expect. While HARP was set to expire at the end of the year, the Federal Housing Finance Agency extended it to Sept. 30, 2017, so there is no gap in refinance offerings. The new high loan-to-value streamlined refinance option has not been named yet, but targets borrowers who are current on their mortgage loans, but have not been able to refinance through traditional programs because of high loan-to-value ratios.
A high profile shareholder’s request to access Freddie Mac’s corporate records was shot down in a case dismissal last week as a federal court ruled that all shareholder rights were transferred to the Federal Housing Finance Agency during the conservatorship. In Timothy J. Pagliara v. Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, plaintiff Tim Pagliara, chief executive of CapWealth Advisors and the executive director of Investors Unite, a GSE shareholders group, filed a lawsuit in court in March to gain access to Freddie’s records, as an individual stockholder. He owns approximately 346,000 shares of Freddie’s junior preferred stock, according to court documents.
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