The annual loan limit announcement from the Federal Housing Finance Agency included mixed news for the non-agency market. The FHFA said both the conforming and high-cost loan limits for the government-sponsored enterprises will be unchanged for 2014. However, a reduction to the maximum loan sizes Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can purchase is still under consideration. “Further information on potential future changes in the maximum size of loans that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac guarantee will be ...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency needs to be more hands-on and engaged with additional resources to best oversee Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks, according to the agency’s inspector general. In its semi-annual report to Congress, the FHFA IG noted “recurring oversight issues that policymakers may want to consider as part of reforming the secondary mortgage market.” “The recent housing crisis has shown...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency this week announced 2014 conforming loan limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that are unchanged from those currently in place, but it’s unclear whether the agency still intends to direct the government-sponsored enterprises to set lower limits. The agency cited statutory requirements of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 that require changes in the baseline loan limit, $417,000, based on the movement of house prices. Al-though house prices have risen over the past year, the FHFA said, they still haven’t made up all the decline since the housing market tanked in 2007. In the third quarter of 2013, the FHFA house price index was...

The once deadlocked, but now all-but-certain, confirmation of Rep. Mel Watt, D-NC, to be the new director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency has left industry observers uncertain as to the continued policy direction of the FHFA.

A rough measure of production profitability, the ratio of production income to origination volume, fell from 179 basis points in the second quarter to just 84 bps in the third. Back in the Wonderland of early 2012, this ratio was 203 bps.

Meanwhile, a new report from Compass Point Research is predicting that the FHFA will establish a final risk-to-capital threshold for MIs of 18:1.

“Watt will not lower the ceiling for 2014,” said one mortgage insurance executive. “Maybe, he will change them at some point but, not next year.”

The jumbo market accounted for 16.7 percent of total mortgage originations during the third quarter of 2013 and was much stronger than other sectors.

During the first nine months of 2013, there were 512 different companies that sold mortgages to the government-sponsored enterprises that had been originated by loan correspondents of mortgage brokers. Some 324 of these lenders were involved in the broker-wholesale channel.

Elsewhere, in the report FHFA claims significant progress has been made on the development and initial testing of the GSEs’ common securitization platform.