The ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is calling on the Federal Housing Finance Agency to “give serious consideration” to shuttering Fannie Mae’s Retained Attorney Network, but not before answering questions and providing documents about the FHFA’s oversight of the program.

The Obama administration’s Housing Scorecard for September paints a reasonably rosy picture of efforts to help troubled homeowners and future market prospects. With record low mortgage interest rates, housing affordability increased modestly. But the number of new default notices rose from 59,500 in August to 78,900, which is still well below the 96,500 level of a year ago. Notably, sales of real estate owned properties were down this period. Preliminary numbers from July 2011 show that there were 46,200 REO sales, as opposed to 62,200 in June and 61,800 a year ago. New home sales were down slightly in...

More people than expected showed up at the Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention this week in Chicago – including intermittent Occupy protestors – given the hugely uncertain prospects facing the industry. MBA economists are predicting less than $1 trillion in new originations in 2012, which would be the lowest new production volume since 1997, and all three major components in the business – origination, servicing and secondary marketing – face huge structural challenges that so far are still just vaguely mapped out. Yet attendance was up about 18 percent from last year, and several observers noted that investors are...

In five years, the mortgage servicing business will likely be dramatically different than it is now or has been in the past, experts say, and getting there won’t be easy. “Homeowners think servicing is about them, that the industry should be trying to solve their problems,” said Peter Swire, a law professor at Ohio State, during a panel at this week’s Mortgage Bankers Association annual convention. “But the servicer is working primarily for the investor,” he said, adding that the “legal structure of servicing makes the homeowner extraneous.” Although there is widespread acknowledgement that change is necessary, the significant...

The head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency says his agency expects to complete a review of potential improvements to the Home Affordable Refinance Program “by the end of this month” but based on what they heard during a private meeting last week, dissatisfied House Democrats say they expect the results won’t nearly be good enough. FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco met last week with a group of 17 congressmen, led by Reps. Dennis Cardoza, D-CA, and Elijah Cummings, D-MD, to discuss ways to reinvigorate the underwhelming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac refinance program. In what’s been described as a...

A scathing criticism of the way the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Freddie Mac handled a $1.35 billion settlement with Bank of America could cause the regulator and the government-sponsored enterprises to tighten repurchase enforcement – and consequently inflate the buyback problem, according to litigation experts. Speaking on a recent webinar hosted by Inside Mortgage Finance, experts said a report by the FHFA’s Office of the Inspector General which found flaws in the BofA settlement approval process, could push the GSEs and their regulator to lean harder on major lenders to repurchase “bad loans.” This, in turn, could...

Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems has been at the center of two significant developments recently that bring more legal clarity to the mortgage industry’s foreclosure practices – and could portend a quicker resolution of an enormous number of cases currently tied up in foreclosure. Early this week, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Gomes v. Countrywide, declining to reconsider lower court rulings in the case, essentially affirming MERS’ authority to foreclose in California in the process. “The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied,” the high court said in its certiorari summary dispositions. “The chief justice [John Roberts] took...

A ruling by a federal district court in Richmond awarding more than $40 million to a mortgage lender for covered losses should compel private mortgage insurers to be more circumspect about their MI agreements, according to industry attorneys. American International Group, parent company of United Guaranty Residential Insurance Co. of North Carolina, is appealing the court’s ruling that it pay SunTrust Mortgage more than $34.0 million for covered losses, $6.0 million in stipulated interest and about $5.4 million in legal fees and costs. Joseph Norton, AIG spokesman, said the insurer has appealed the decision to the...

Negotiations among major banks and state attorneys general to settle problems in foreclosure servicing practices reached a one-year anniversary this week with little apparent progress over the key issue of how much litigation relief the lenders will gain from the deal. “We worked out a tremendous amount of the settlement and gotten a lot done,” said a spokesman for Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, who has been spearheading the negotiation on behalf of the states. However, he disputed applying the word “imminent,” which some bankers had used, to describe when the settlement might be finalized. “Let’s not jump...

The Securities and Exchange Commission has made a good bit of progress in updating its proposal for shelf eligibility conditions for ABS in light of industry comments and the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act. However, there are still numerous areas that concern major players in the mortgage finance industry. A number of commenters took issue with the SEC’s proposal to impose an additional executive officer certification requirement. The agency originally proposed requiring the issuer to file an exhibit to the registration statement consisting of a certification of the chief executive officer of the depositor that, to his or her knowledge, “the securitized assets backing the issue have...