FINRA will implement margin requirements for trading of wide swaths of GSE MBS, including TBA transactions, specified pools transactions and collateralized mortgage obligations.

The Community Home Lenders Association believe the sharp increase in fees for second-home mortgages will impact middle-income families.

At the direction of FHFA, the GSEs are permanently integrating desktop appraisals into their automated underwriting systems.

Biden’s FHFA nominee Sandra Thompson has made it clear that the agency can’t end the conservatorships without help from the Departments of Treasury and Justice and, most importantly, Congress itself.

In April, Fannie and Freddie will begin charging sharply higher LLPAs on second-home and high-balance mortgages. The change is likely to expand non-agency securitizations at the expense of Fannie and Freddie.

The GSEs will have to find ways to better serve the rural housing, manufactured housing and affordable housing preservation markets.

Multifamily caps have kept Fannie and Freddie from expanding their footprint in the apartment market, which grew by 25% in 2021 and is expected to expand by as much as 11% this year.

Don Layton believes the new 2022 loan limits will cause home prices to increase even more, but the politicization of the housing-finance system makes it unlikely FHFA will be able to do anything about it.

The new goals don’t deviate dramatically from what the agency proposed in August, but the mulitfamily goals will only apply to 2022 instead of the usual three-year time span.

Appraisers frequently use free-form text fields in their valuation reports to describe neighborhoods in ways that appear to violate fair lending regulations.