Software company Ellie Mae recently teamed up with Fannie Mae to incorporate Fannie’s risk management tools into its system to make it easier for lenders to do business with the GSE. This will help ensure that the loans meet Fannie’s sale eligibility requirements. Although Ellie Mae has its own system, Encompass LOS, the company decided to incorporate Fannie’s risk management tools, like Desktop Underwriter, Collateral Underwriter and Early Check software, into Encompass. The California-based company said it hopes the integration will enhance transparency and avoid any potential last-minute surprises since the system will examine loans beginning from eligibility all the way to loan delivery.
Fannie’s New Headquarters. Fannie Mae will begin occupying its new state-of-the-art headquarters in Washington, DC in 2017, replacing the site of the Washington Post building. Renderings filed with the DC’s Board of Zoning Adjustment illustrate window-filled twin buildings connected by several bridges and notes that it will have about 1.2 million square feet spread out among 12 stories and retail on the bottom. Freddie Mac SVP Receives Award. Christina Boyle, a Freddie senior vice president, was named a 2015 “Power Player” by MReport, honoring women in housing finance. GSE Q2 Earnings Release Date. Freddie Mac announced that it will release its second-quarter 2015 financial results on Tuesday morning, Aug. 4. Freddie Prices Second Q Certificate. Freddie Mac priced its second Q Certificates...
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are getting more business in the so-called conforming-jumbo market this year, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis of mortgage-backed securities data.Through the first six months of 2015, the two GSEs securitized $39.44 billion of home loans that exceed $417,000, the maximum loan amount in areas that are not designated high-cost markets. That figure, including only mortgages for one-unit properties, was up 112.5 percent from the first half of 2014, about double the 55.8 percent growth rate in total Fannie/Freddie business over that period. Conforming-jumbo loans accounted for 9.6 percent of total GSE business on single-unit properties in the first half of this year, compared to 7.1 percent for the first six months of 2014.
Lenders have slowly loosened underwriting standards since the third quarter of 2013, with the credit expansion largely focused on the agency market, according to a new analysis by the Urban Institute’s Housing Finance Policy Center. Actions by the government-sponsored enterprises and the FHA to address buyback risk appear to have helped prompt lenders to loosen underwriting standards on agency loans. The HFPC’s credit availability index tracks ...
Mortgage lenders that sell loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still focused on delivering single-family mortgages with relatively low credit risk, according to an Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of loan-level data from the government-sponsored enterprises. In the second quarter of 2015, 66.4 percent of loans sold to the GSEs had credit scores of 740 or higher. That was up from 64.4 percent in the first quarter and 60.6 percent during ... [Includes one data chart]
In preparation for more risk sharing, including its first actual-loss transaction, Fannie Mae released an updated, more detailed single-family loan performance dataset last week to provide more transparency to the market. The GSE plans to move away from fixed severity deals to an actual-loss framework for its Connecticut Avenue Securities risk-sharing deals as early as the fourth quarter of 2015.The enhanced dataset will include credit performance up to and including property disposition, including credit event dates, costs incurred and Fannie’s recovery proceeds. Until now, Fannie risk-sharing transactions used pre-set loss severity schedules to determine investor loss exposure.Laurel Davis, vice president for credit risk transfer at Fannie, said the GSE is providing access to the data now in order to give the market...
The Federal Housing Finance Agency Office of Inspector General released a report this week that found that the housing finance examiner program is not on track to produce commissioned examiners qualified enough to lead major risk sections of GSE examinations. “We found evidence indicating that the housing finance examiner program was not on track to meet its central objective,” said the report. In fact, only one of the 66 enrolled examiners had shown paperwork proving that he successfully completed the required on-the- job training assignments during 2014 and early 2015. “Further, FHFA records indicated that a considerable of minority enrolled examiners, more than 20 percent, completed no more than one fo the required 16 course,” said the report.
Heavy refinance activity in the first half of 2015 caused a significant shift in the kinds of single-family MBS produced by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. Issuance of MBS backed by adjustable-rate mortgages has dropped sharply in 2015, and ARMs haven’t had much of a presence for years. ARM MBS production by Fannie and Freddie in the first half of 2015 was down 20.1 percent from a year ago. The drop in Ginnie ARM securitization was less severe, 18.3 percent, but ARMs accounted for an even smaller share of overall production (1.7 percent) at Ginnie than the 2.9 percent share they had in government-sponsored enterprise MBS. Oddly, the heavy refinance market in the first half of 2015 did not appear...[Includes two data tables]
The U.S. Court of Federal Claims ordered the Department of the Treasury to release all discovery documents pertaining to the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac last week in connection with one of the shareholder lawsuits challenging the government’s seizure of earnings generated by the two government-sponsored enterprises. The ruling in Fairholme Funds v. The United States prevents the Treasury from withholding documents it argued are privileged and designated as “protected information.” The shareholders said...
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