Fannie Mae plans to discontinue selling homes to one of the largest rent-to-own firms as part of a crack down on abusive forms of seller financing. After criticism brewed about abuses with practices such as rent-to-own leases and long-term installment agreements such as contract-for-deed sales, the GSE said it will not sell REO properties to Vision Property, a South Carolina-based firm. The firm has been in operation since 2004 and owns more than 6,000 homes across the country. Vision was highlighted in a New York Times article last year, which noted, “Most tenants walk away with nothing, having sunk money for rent and repairs into homes they had once hoped to own. Others faced surprise evictions.”

Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt is worried that the Federal Home Loan Banks are relying too much on short-term funding of long-term assets. He called this a “funding mismatch.” Watt spoke at the FHLBank Annual Director’s Conference last week about the banks’ performance and said they reported strong net earnings of $3.4 billion in the last quarter. However, he also dished on a couple of supervisory priorities and said he was most concerned about a funding mismatch.” Watt acknowledged that changes in the rules on money market funds have been a significant driver of investor appetite for short-term FHLBank paper, but noted that the FHLBanks can’t afford to think it will always be that way.

A woman stealing personal identifying information from more than 2,000 Freddie Mac employees and affiliates was sentenced to prison last month. Between 2012 and 2014, Allise Jones, a 29-year- old from Maryland with no known ties to the company, conspired with others to use personal information about current and former employees of the GSE. Freddie was advised in August 2016 by law enforcement authorities that personal information of up to 2,500 employees may have been accessible to several unauthorized persons in April 2013, according to a spokesperson for Freddie. The Department of Justice announced that a federal jury convicted Jones in February and on May 19 sentenced her to 5.5 years in prison.

Fannie Mae’s new Healthy Housing Rewards program offers price breaks for multifamily borrowers who incorporate healthy design features into their newly constructed and rehabilitated affordable properties. Those features include things that provide cleaner air, encourage physical activity and incorporate common space, community gardens, playgrounds and easier access to biking and pedestrian traffic into the community. The GSE said it’s important that the affordable rental properties it finances be built and managed in a way that creates a healthy environment. The Healthy Housing Rewards initiative will target properties where at least 60 percent of the units are serving tenants earning 60 percent or less of the area median income.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is opening back up the possibility of adding a question about language preference on the Uniform Residential Loan Application. In a request for input issued on May 25, the FHFA is seeking information on a number of potential short-term and long-term improvements to help borrowers not fluent in English better understand the mortgage process. The FHFA is looking for stakeholder views on issues like translating more documents in different languages, education about multilingual housing counselors, using emerging technologies and tracking borrowers’ preferred languages. The FHFA originally suggested data tracking last year and considered including a question about a borrower’s language preference in the Uniform Residential Loan Application to help lenders and...

The GSEs’ reperforming loan programs are making inroads with both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac announcing recent RPL transactions to help reduce the amount of illiquid assets in their portfolios.Fannie introduced its first reperforming loan sale back in November and the program has continued to gain popularity with each sale. The program has grown from its first sale, which totaled $789.2 million in unpaid principal balance to the most recent transaction of approximately $3.0 billion. The pool included approximately 13,700 loans that were previously delinquent, but are performing again with or without the use of a loan modification.

The demand for single-family rental financing will likely grow, said the Urban Institute, on the heels of Fannie Mae completing its first single-family rental securitization deal with a large institutional investor. The GSE has done smaller SFR transactions but this one, a $1 billion deal with Invitation Homes, was billed as a pilot program earlier this year. The Blackstone Group subsidiary, based in Dallas, has a portfolio of about 50,000 homes acquired from foreclosures. It is the largest single-family rental operator in the U.S. These kinds of transactions are expected to increase as investors rely more on leverage to earn an acceptable rate of return, said...

Fannie DUS Provides Additional Data for Multifamily. Fannie Mae announced the creation of DUS Disclose, a new MBS disclosure website that will enhance the transparency and increase the data available for multifamily securities in alignment with the industry. The new platform will replace the existing Multifamily Securities Locator Service and is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2017. Fannie Headquarters to Morph into High-End Grocer. As Fannie Mae prepares to vacate its iconic headquarters with a move to downtown Washington in 2018, plans are coming along for the soon-to-be former site of the GSE. Roadside Development announced...

TD Bank is by far the biggest bank investor in card ABS, and in ABS overall, but its $12.71 billion portfolio of card ABS was down some $702.6 million from December.

While the industry continues to debate the merits of allowing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to build a capital cushion for “zero day” in 2018, investors in MBS have a different agenda: making sure that whatever the future holds for the government-sponsored enterprises, it had better include a federal guarantee on conventional mortgage securities. Without it, the MBS market would suffer greatly – as would residential lending and the sale of new and existing homes. So far, no one knows...