The Department of Housing and Urban Developments Office of the Inspector General has announced a second round of mortgage note sales for this year under the expanded Distressed Asset Stabilization Program. Separate sales of approximately 20,000 severely delinquent loans have been scheduled for June 26 and July 10 as part of HUDs effort to reduce its bulging inventory of foreclosed residential properties and to target relief to areas hit the hardest by foreclosures. HUD estimates the total unpaid balance of the loans in this sale at ...
Regulation by Mortgagee Letter. The Department of Housing and Urban Development this week urged House lawmakers to grant it statutory authority to make temporary changes to the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage program through mortgagee letters while working to formalize the change through rulemaking. In a hearing before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Insurance this week, Charles Coulter, HUD deputy assistant secretary for single-family housing, sought specific authority to limit the amount that may be drawn from ...
The Federal Housing Administration has streamlined requirements for permissible sources of downpayment funds, which should be a boost to borrowers using government financing.
Private mortgage insurers lost a little collective market share to the FHA and VA during the first quarter, although that may have been simply a timing distortion, according to a new market analysis and ranking by Inside Mortgage Finance. The more groundbreaking news is that the surviving private MIs, as a group, probably turned a profit during the first quarter of 2013. The four publicly traded companies reported a combined loss on their domestic MI business of just $14.6 million during the first quarter of 2013. Essent Guaranty, the fifth-largest MI in terms of new business, is...
Overall FHA loan production dropped a tad during the first quarter of 2013 even as refinancing volume remained elevated, according to an Inside FHA Lending analysis of agency data. FHA lenders produced a total of $63.7 billion in new FHA-insured loans during the quarter, down 0.6 percent from the previous quarter but up 27.4 percent from the same period last year. FHA streamline refinancing rose 8.4 percent to $31.0 billion in the first quarter from the prior period. That was also up a whopping 97.8 percent from the same period last year. In a new report to Congress, the ... [2 charts]
Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae pumped out a respectable $152.3 billion in new single-family MBS in April, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS market analysis and ranking. Aprils issuance level was up 2.6 percent from March and reversed, at least temporarily, a two-month downturn in new production. The cyclical peak for the agency MBS market came back in November 2012, when a whopping $199.4 billion in new securities were issued. Although the market couldnt sustain...[Includes one data chart]
Federal regulators said they will collectively work with Congress to reduce the agency market share of MBS issuance. The members of the Financial Stability Oversight Council said completion of the qualified-residential mortgage rule will also help increase non-agency activity. The council recommends that the Treasury Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency continue to work with Congress and other stakeholders to develop and implement a broad plan to reform the housing finance system, the FSOC said in its 2013 annual report, released late last week. Tobias Adrian, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and contributor to the report, said...
Fannie Mae and IBM are working together on at least one big technology project: a new data center. But is the relationship about to go even further? Meanwhile, MBS issuance stayed hot in April.