The federal statute that authorized the Department of Housing and Urban Development to establish the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage program addresses only HUD’s authority to insure reverse mortgages and not the lender’s contractual right to foreclose, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has ruled. Affirming the district court’s decision in The Estate of Caldwell Jones, Jr., Executrix Vanessa Jones and Leah Grace Jones, Minor v. Live Well Financial Inc., the circuit court determined that the HECM statute did not prevent foreclosure pursuant to a reverse-mortgage contract originated before Aug. 4, 2014, even if the non-borrowing spouse continued to live in the mortgaged property. The question before the court was whether the statute can be read broadly to prevent foreclosure after the borrower’s death and prevent the non-borrowing spouse from being ejected from the ...

FHA Issues Waiver of Property Inspections in Disaster-Stricken California Counties. FHA has issued a waiver of its timing policy for completing property inspections prior to closing or endorsing a loan for FHA insurance. The waiver is in effect in presidentially declared major disaster areas in Lake and Shasta Counties, CA, that were ravaged by wildfires and high winds. FHA believes that the wildfires and high winds have stabilized so as not to cause any further damage to properties, even though FEMA has not declared “all clear” in the affected areas. The waiver allows damage inspections to be completed after Oct. 2, for properties located in the PDMDA. NC Commissioner of Banks Amends State Reverse Mortgage Rules. The North Carolina Commissioner of Banks recently amended its ...

Lenders expressed support for the FHA’s new interim policy requiring a second appraisal for home-equity conversion mortgages when the initial property valuation may be inflated. The new appraisal policy for HECMs took effect on Oct. 1 and will be in place through Sept. 1, 2019. FHA will review the policy to determine whether to renew it beyond fiscal year 2019, said FHA Commissioner Brian Montgomery during a press briefing this week. FHA will perform a collateral risk assessment of ...

Ginnie Mae assured the mortgage industry that it would accept so-called VA orphan loans as long as they satisfy the terms of corrective legislation passed by the House Financial Services Committee recently. “As long as the mortgage loan complies with the law, we will accept it and put our guarantee on it,” said an agency spokesperson in response to an Inside FHA/VA Lending inquiry. Ginnie’s assurance provides certainty to a subset of VA loans that have been in limbo since June because they could not be delivered into Ginnie mortgage-backed securities. Lawmakers responded to industry calls for a legislative fix last week by voting overwhelmingly to approve H.R. 6737, the “Protect Affordable Mortgages for Veterans Act of 2018.” Introduced by Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-NY, the bill would eliminate the seasoning requirements in the recently enacted Dodd-Frank Act reform legislation, which conflicted with ...

Originations of government-insured mortgages rose 11.2 percent from the first to the second quarter of 2018, according to Inside Mortgage Finance estimates. That increase was slightly lower than the 17.1 percent gain in total first-lien originations over that period. The big winner for the second quarter was the jumbo sector, where loan volume surged 33.5 percent from the first three months of the year. On a year-to-date basis, government lending was down 12.6 percent from the first half of 2017. This reflects the steep decline in refinance lending in general, which affected FHA/VA production significantly. Jumbo lending was also down, by 6.6 percent, from the first six months of last year, but the conventional-conforming market saw a 4.2 percent gain at the midway point in 2018. FHA/VA loans accounted for 22.8 percent of first-lien originations in the first half of 2018. The government share for all of last year was ... [Chart]

It looks like the Department of Housing and Urban Development will not be able meet its September target date for rolling out its long-awaited FHA condominium reform rule. Such is the consensus among stakeholders whose hopes were raised when HUD Secretary Ben Carson told the House Financial Services Committee in June that he would be issuing the rule this month. “HUD and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (within the Office of Management and Budget) want to release the rules with the updated Single Family Handbook and they are still working on that,” said a real estate industry executive. He added that despite what Carson said at the committee hearing, “September is not likely for a release.” As of press time, the final condo reform rule had not yet been delivered for OMB review, a process that in the past has taken months to complete. In contrast, it took about a ...

The delinquency rates on the approximately 7.9 million FHA loans outstanding fell by 20.7 basis points in August from the previous month, according to an Inside FHA/VA Lending analysis of FHA data. About 11.24 percent of FHA loans were in various stages of delinquency at the end of August. An estimated 4.73 percent of active FHA loans were 30-60 days past due while 3.90 percent were 90-plus days seriously delinquent at midpoint of the third quarter. FHA loans that were 60 to 90 days delinquent accounted for 1.56 percent of FHA loans outstanding while 1.05 percent of loans were in foreclosure. Texas, which accounted for 805,535 of total FHA loans being serviced, reported 11.4 percent of the loans as delinquent or in foreclosure. Second-place California showed a 7.39 percent delinquency/foreclosure rate overall. The state’s foreclosure rate was at a very low 0.53 percent. New Jersey and Louisiana ... [Chart]

Loss rates for notes sold in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s distressed asset sales program are lower than those for notes that pass through the traditional conveyance claim process, according to HUD’s inspector general. An IG audit found that the DASP loss rate was more than 3 percentage points lower than the loss rate of similar conveyance notes. The IG took into account the losses for actual DASP sales and real estate-owned conveyance claims during the same audit period, the IG said. Ultimately, the DASP program saved the FHA insurance fund more money than the conveyance process, the report concluded. The FHA Office of Housing conducts mortgage loan sales under the Single Family Loan Sale Initiative, and most distressed notes are sold through DASP. The initiative aims to maximize recoveries to the ...

HUD Nails Florida Company with Discrimination Charge. The Department of Housing and Urban Development charged a Florida company and its owners with housing discrimination for intentionally targeting Hispanic homeowners in a predatory mortgage modification scheme that increased, rather than decreased, their risk of foreclosure. HUD filed charges of discrimination under the Fair Housing Act against Advocate Law Groups of Florida and owners Jon B. Lindeman, Jr., and Ephigenia Lindeman. The defendants allegedly ran a deceptive advertising campaign for loan modification that aired on Spanish-language radio and television throughout Florida. Homeowners were offered $500 gift cards as an enticement to sign for a loan modification. Ginnie Mae MBS Outstanding Increases. Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities issuance totaled $38.9 billion in August, raising its ...

With nonbanks dominating Ginnie Mae’s single-family MBS program, liquidity is an important factor in the issuance and servicing of Ginnie MBS and has been the agency’s focus in recent years.