The clock is ticking on the effective date of a host of new data collection and reporting requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and mortgage lenders are still waiting for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to complete some components of the rule necessary for full compliance. For this reason, the regulator should delay mandatory compliance much later than the scheduled January 2018 implementation date, industry trade groups said. “Although we greatly appreciate the CFPB’s work to facilitate implementation of this major data collection and reporting rule, the CFPB’s regulatory process and technological framework for this rule are still incomplete,” lender representatives said in a letter this week to the agency. Proposed amendments have not been finalized...
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac generated a combined $4.86 billion in net income during the second quarter of 2017, down a modest 2.4 percent from the first three months of the year, according to an Inside Mortgage Finance analysis of earnings reports released this week. The two government-sponsored enterprises have racked up $9.85 billion in net income through the first six months of the year, more than double their combined earnings for the same period in 2016. In the first quarter of last year, interest rate volatility yielded significant accounting losses on their hedges, which suppressed net income at Fannie and produced a net loss at Freddie. Freddie officials said...
As the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau prepares to begin assessing its ability-to-repay/qualified mortgage rule, national representatives of the mortgage industry and other financial services participants this week urged the regulator to deal with what’s known as the “GSE patch.” The patch provides a temporary safe harbor for mortgages eligible to be sold to the government-sponsored enterprises that have debt-to-income ratios that exceed 43 percent, the maximum allowed under the ATR rule. The Housing Policy Council of the Financial Services Roundtable noted...
Housing finance groups are concerned that the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s idea to better serve borrowers with limited proficiency in English by adding a language preference question to loan applications could create a host of legal challenges and systemic risks. A year ago, the FHFA decided to defer a plan to include a question about a borrower’s language preference on the uniform residential loan application, and gather more input instead. The agency specifically asked for information on potential short-term and long-term improvements to help borrowers not fluent in English better understand the mortgage process. And from the looks of the comments, it appears...
Watt noted that, “Some lenders are finally showing more willingness to extend credit to borrowers who meet the broader credit criteria reflected in the enterprises’ credit boxes…”
Cowen & Co. analyst Jaret Seiberg believes the Senate Banking Committee remains on track to unveil GSE reform legislation late in the fourth quarter...
The CFPB plans to make some significant, but unspecified, changes to its mortgage servicing rule sometime this fall, in response to concerns raised by the industry, the bureau revealed in a blog posting about its latest semiannual rulemaking agenda, released earlier this month. The document is current as of April 1, 2017, and does not reflect the bureau’s issuance of its arbitration final rule, its assessments of its mortgage servicing rule under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and its ability-to-repay rule, nor its proposed temporary increase in the institutional and transactional thresholds for home equity lines of credit. The agency said it is “considering concerns raised by industry participants regarding a few substantive aspects of the mortgage servicing rule ...
As the CFPB prepares to do the Dodd-Frank Act required assessment of its 2013 mortgage servicing rule under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, one industry trade group has urged the bureau to provide servicers with more regulatory guidance and clarifications of the current rule. The Consumer Mortgage Coalition said in a letter to the regulator that it has appreciated the opportunity to work with the bureau as it developed the final servicing requirements. “However, as the CFPB is aware, the final regulatory requirements are very prescriptive, yet unclear, and sometimes conflict with other statutory or regulatory requirements,” said the CMC. “In some areas of the regulation, the CFPB misunderstood the reason for the problems it was trying to solve ...
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