Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, at the direction of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, last week rolled out changes to their selling representation-and-warranty frameworks in an effort to reduce lenders’ concerns about when they might be asked to repurchase a loan. The GSEs noted that some lenders were concerned about repurchase risk and other market factors causing an increase in credit overlays, which has limited access to credit for potential creditworthy borrowers.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee fee pricing disparities were dramatically leveled out in 2013, according to data released by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. In 2010 and 2011, small lenders typically paid about 10 basis points more in g-fees to the government-sponsored enterprises than did the five largest lenders in the market, the report shows. In 2012, the disparity fell to about 6 bps. Last year, it was down to 2 bps. Small lenders – defined as those that ranked outside the top 100 GSE sellers – paid an average of 53 bps, while the top five sellers paid 51 bps. Three more lender groups based on size that fell between the two extremes paid average fees of 51 or 52 bps....

The case against the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s chief operating officer ended last week after a Washington, DC, Superior Court judge found Richard Hornsby not guilty of making violent threats against former FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco.Judge Juliet McKenna acquitted Hornsby of two misdemeanor charges of attempted threats to do bodily harm to DeMarco.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are testing parts of the new common securitization platform and are expected to have the system largely built in 2015. But the GSEs have a lot of work to do building interfaces for their systems to work with the new platform while the joint venture that’s running the CSP won’t be functional for several years, according to two recent Federal Housing Finance Agency reports.

Fannie Mae has priced its final risk-sharing transaction of the year, a nearly $1.5 billion offering that priced wider than previous deals, the GSE announced last week. The $1.49 billion note is the GSE’s fourth transaction under its Connecticut Avenue Securities series of 2014. Last year, the Federal Housing Finance Agency ordered both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to shrink the GSEs’ role in the U.S. housing market.

Fannie, Freddie Conforming Loan Limits Mostly Unchanged for 2015. The Federal Housing Finance Agency this week said that conforming loan limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2015 would remain at current levels in most markets. For much of the country, the conforming loan limit for one-unit properties will remain at $417,000. The loan limits are established under the terms of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 and are calculated each year.

The Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization recently released version 3.3.1 of its residential reference model for public comment. This version of the standard includes data points and structures related to a number of recent regulatory and reporting requirements and additions in the areas of mortgage insurance coverage and conditions, title, payoff and property valuation. “Version 3.3.1 of the MISMO Reference Model and Logical Data Dictionary are the direct result of MISMO contributors from across the industry collaborating to solve business problems and develop the standards needed to meet industry needs in today’s rapidly changing regulatory and compliance environment,” said Mike Fratantoni, president of MISMO and chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association. In addition to the LDD, XML schema and ...

Commercial banks and thrifts reported a combined $4.67 billion in mortgage-banking income during the third quarter of 2014, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis of call-report data. Third-quarter results were down 4.9 percent from the second quarter, which is consistent with the figures reported by publicly held mortgage lenders. Year-to-date mortgage-banking income for the depository institutions was $12.96 billion, down 37.0 percent from the first nine months of last year. Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase continued to rank as the top two banks in mortgage-banking income, but both reported declines of more than 25 percent from the second quarter to the third. On a year-to-date basis, the two lenders accounted for 47.3 percent of total mortgage-banking income earned ...

Together, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in October posted a combined decline in the volume of single-family mortgages securitized, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. Fannie and Freddie issued $63.1 billion in single-family mortgage-backed securities in October, a 1.5 percent decrease from September. On a year-to-date basis, October’s MBS issuance dropped an even steeper 50.6 percent.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities remained the preferred investment choice of the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks during the third quarter of 2014, with a very slight decline from the previous quarter, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside The GSEs based on data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Meanwhile, Ginnie Mae securities posted effectively no movement within the FHLBank system during the three-month period ending Sept. 30, 2014.