The new version incorporates lessons learned from the financial crisis of 2008 along with contemporary concerns about mortgage originations and servicing.

The fee assessed by FHA would cost lenders roughly $30 million a year, or $23 per loan, according to calculations done by Inside Mortgage Finance.

Although investors and participants initially showed a great deal of interest in the fledgling market for bonds backed by single-family rental properties, rating agencies are starting to take a closer look at the business and don’t like everything they see. “Rising U.S. home prices have pushed down rental yields in many single-family rental markets, a trend that will likely discourage some institutional investors from buying distressed properties and converting them into rental units,” according to a recent report from Moody’s Investor Service. The rating agency adds...

Greater standardization and transparency is needed to overcome the impediments to growing a new issue, non-agency MBS market, according to Michael Stegman, housing finance policy adviser to Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew. In remarks this week at the JP Morgan Securitized Products Research Conference, Stegman said lack of housing finance reform, lingering distrust among non-agency securitizers, lack of product and the trauma of heavy losses have stunted the growth of the market. The lack of reform of the government-sponsored enterprises should not become...

Some mortgage attorneys believe pricing disparities of 6 basis points to 25 bps can result in a fair-lending referral.

A few weeks back, Rep. Mark Takano, D-CA, called for Congressional hearings on the single-family rental MBS market, singling out investments made by the Blackstone Group.

Company executive Doug Reilly, commenting on the mortgage M&A market, had this to say: “It seems we need to take 20 girls to the alter just to marry one”…

A federal judge last week granted discovery to attorneys for a hedge fund representing one group of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholders as it seeks to challenge the government’s August 2012 “net worth sweep” that effectively confiscates both GSEs’ profits. Fairholme Capital Management, founded by Wall Street veteran Bruce Berkowitz, controls roughly $2.4 billion (face value) of Fannie and Freddie "junior" preferred. Thanks to the September 2008 government takeover of the two firms, the U.S. Treasury controls the senior preferred and is effectively the owner of the two GSEs.

Yet another defendant in the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s massive litigation effort against some of the nation’s largest lenders for bad mortgage-backed securities sales to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has settled. The FHFA announced last week that Societe Generale has agreed to pay $122 million to settle a suit by the Finance Agency regarding non-agency MBS purchased by the two GSEs during 2006.

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks will now be required to report directly any suspected fraud to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network under the terms of a final rule. Published in the Feb. 25 Federal Register, the final rule adopts “without significant change” FinCEN’s November 2011 proposal to require the GSEs to file suspicious activity reports directly with FinCEN rather than through their own regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency.