It’s been 2.5 years since the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced they were joining forces to begin compiling a National Mortgage Database, and the project continues to spook some in the industry. Several news reports over the past week have billed the initiative as part of the Obama administration’s “secret race database,” based on a report last week by Paul Sperry, a fellow at the Hoover Center. The Federal Housing Finance Agency continues to defend the project as a tool to help regulators ward off future mortgage crises. The NMD will be...
The titans of the industry – the four banks with over $1 trillion in total assets – shrank their mortgage portfolios by a combined 0.5 percent over that period.
One senior mortgage manager, who has been in the business for 25 years., said despite what lenders may say about closing times, actual experience is probably worse. “No one is closing under 30 days,” he said. “Most will be over 50 days.”
Housing finance and housing policy should be clearly separated, said Rep. Randy Neugebauer, R-TX, speaking on a Bipartisan Policy Center GSE reform panel with Rep. John Delaney, D-MD, in Washington, DC, on July 16. “We should detach the financial piece away from the political process,” he said, adding that the market should determine how many houses and apartments to build, not the government. Neugebauer and Delaney agreed that reform needs to happen and that today’s housing finance system is largely controlled by the federal government. “The government’s role is to provide liquidity to the market and be more predicable like the banking system, which I’m a big supporter of,” said Delaney. “Then there’s the role of pricing risks, which I’m not a supporter of. The government has its roles mixed up.”
The servicing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac single-family mortgages remained heavily concentrated among a relatively small number of companies, but the market continued to gradually de-consolidate during the second quarter of 2015. An Inside The GSEs analysis of new Fannie and Freddie disclosures reveals that the top five players in the market serviced 46.8 percent of securitized single-family mortgages outstanding at the end of June. At the end of the first quarter, they serviced 47.6 percent of the market. Freddie business was more concentrated – 51.0 percent of Freddie servicing was held by the GSE’s top five companies. These percentages are based on the servicing of outstanding mortgage-backed securities where a servicer is identified in MBS...
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