Difficulty coming up with comparable home sales data in rural areas has prompted the Department of Veterans Affairs to clarify its requirements for comparable sales for VA appraisals. The VA lender handbook requires comparable sales in appraisal reports to be located as near as possible to the property. Compliance with the requirement has been particularly difficult for VA lenders in rural and certain urban areas, where properties are a good distance apart. According to VA Circular 26-17-14, VA does not set a minimum or maximum distance between properties for an appraisal but requires that “comparable sales should be located as close to the subject as practical.” In cases where obtaining data is a problem because properties may be many miles from the subject property, appraisers should explain why those comparable sales were used and how they compare and/or compete with the ...
Moody’s Rates Credit Suisse FHA Securitization Transaction. Moody’s assigned investment-grade ratings to Credit Suisse’s first securitization deal in 2017 backed by seasoned re-performing and performing, fully amortizing, fixed- and adjustable-rate mortgages insured by FHA. The deal is the first FHA-insured re-performing transaction since 2010, according to the rating agency. The collateral pool is comprised of 672 first-lien, fixed-rate loans and ARMs with a weighted average updated FICO score of 614 and loan-to-value ratio of 94.2 percent. Approximately 82.4 percent of the loans in the collateral pool were previously modified. Approximately 52.8 percent of the loans have been current for at least 24 months. Another 17.3 percent of the loans have been current for more than 12 months. Comments Sought on Various Information Collection Proposals. The Department of Housing and ...
The Trump administration has revived a controversial proposal to tap FHA lenders to help pay for technology upgrades at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD is among nine federal agencies facing significant cuts in their discretionary budgets, al-though guarantee commitments for FHA’s single-family mortgage insurance program and Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities programs were kept at their previous fiscal levels, $400 billion and $500 billion, respectively. The White House budget plan incorporates...
In response to President Trump’s recent executive orders on regulatory reform, the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced it is looking for industry feedback on any of its existing regulations that might be outdated, ineffective or excessively burdensome. As required by Executive Order 13777, “Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs,” HUD said it is in the process of establishing a regulatory task force charged with identifying agency regulations that should be repealed, replaced or modified. As part of that review, the agency is inviting the public to weigh in on the adequacy and relevancy of its current regulatory framework. “HUD’s goal in conducting the review is to make the department’s regulations more effective and less burdensome in achieving HUD’s ...
Financial Freedom, an Austin, TX-based servicer, agreed to an $89 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice to settle allegations that it violated the False Claims Act, the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act, and FHA servicing requirements in connection with its participation in FHA’s Home Equity Conversion Mortgages, or “reverse mortgage,” program. The Justice Department alleged that Financial Freedom sought to obtain insurance payments for interest from FHA “despite failing to properly disclose on the insurance claim forms it filed with the agency that the mortgagee was not eligible for such interest payments because it had failed to meet various deadlines relating to appraisal of the property, submission of claims to the Department of Housing and Urban ...
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