During his long career in mortgage finance, Marzol held senior posts at Fannie Mae where he served as executive vice president and chief credit officer...
The House Financial Services Committee last week spent three days marking up the Republican majority’s alternative to the Dodd-Frank Act. H.R. 10, the Financial CHOICE Act, introduced late last month by committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, would make a number of changes to the mortgage regulatory landscape. One provision would provide a safe harbor against litigation for residential mortgages held on the lender’s balance sheet since the origination of the loan if the mortgage fails to comply with ability-to-repay requirements. The measure also would revise the definition of “points and fees” under the Truth in Lending Act to exclude fees paid for affiliated business arrangements. Other language in the bill would exempt smaller creditors from TILA’s escrow requirements. Another provision ...
As the House Financial Services Committee prepared to begin marking up the Financial CHOICE Act last week, the Consumer Mortgage Coalition warned lawmakers that the bill would actually interfere with fixing the problems with the CFPB’s mortgage rules, despite the improvements it would otherwise make in the regulatory landscape. “A major problem facing the mortgage industry today is the Rube Goldberg morass of CFPB regulations that are so poorly written that no one knows how to comply,” the CMC said in a letter to lawmakers prior to the hearing. “The mortgage markets will not heal until the CFPB mortgage regulations are fixed. Fixing the regulations requires revising them through the normal notice and comment rulemaking process.” The problem, however, is ...
Rep. Andy Barr, R-KY, last week re-introduced the Portfolio Lending and Mortgage Access Act (H.R. 2226), legislation that aims to expand access to mortgage credit by conferring qualified mortgage status upon loans originated by a bank and held in portfolio. The bill sponsor also hopes that it will discourage the practices that led to the 2008 financial crisis and the resulting taxpayer bailouts of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and too-big-to-fail financial institutions. The legislation had some bipartisan support when Barr introduced it in the previous Congress, passing the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 255-174. However, the measure never made it out of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Supporters hope this time around will be ...
Ocwen Financial Corp. recently filed two related motions that seek an early court ruling that the CFPB is unconstitutional, and therefore its enforcement action against the lender/servicer should be thrown out.Echoing an argument made earlier by PHH Corp. in its own dispute with the bureau, Ocwen told the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, West Palm Beach Division, that the CFPB is unconstitutionally structured because it vests “too much unfettered power” in the hands of the agency’s director and in the bureau itself. The company informed the court and the Department of Justice that it intends to directly challenge the CFPB’s constitutionality at the earliest possible opportunity and to seek dismissal of the case on this ...
Ocwen Financial Corp. is facing more trouble than just its struggle with the CFPB and a number of state regulators. The mortgage lender/servicer also faces the increasing likelihood of some ratings downgrades as well as pending class-action lawsuits. Fitch Ratings recently revised Ocwen’s U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities servicer ratings outlook to negative. “The revision of the rating outlook for the servicer ratings is based on uncertainty surrounding the financial and operational impact of new regulatory actions taken by the CFPB and the multi-state actions following the findings of the Multi-State Mortgage Committee,” Fitch said. The negative rating outlook also takes into consideration Ocwen’s financial condition. Fitch placed the company’s and its corporate parent’s long-term issuer default rating on “rating watch ...
Lenders should think twice about offering non-qualified mortgages that depend only on a borrower’s assets – particularly a big downpayment – to establish the borrower’s ability, a new report from the CFPB suggests. In the spring edition of the bureau’s supervisory highlights, issued last week, the regulator warned that a large downpayment alone is not enough to prove a borrower’s ability to repay a non-QM that is based on the consumer’s assets. “As an initial matter, a downpayment cannot be treated as an asset for purposes of considering the consumer’s income or assets under the ATR rule,” said the CFPB. “The ATR rule requires creditors to consider a consumer’s reasonably expected income or assets, ‘other than the value of the dwelling, including ...
The CFPB claims that some mortgage servicers are violating the law by failing to provide the required foreclosure protections to struggling homeowners seeking to save their homes, according to the agency's latest supervisory highlights report, released last week. Other issues identified during recent CFPB examinations include premature foreclosure filings, mishandling of escrow accounts, incomplete periodic statements and dual tracking. “Supervision continues to observe serious problems with the loss mitigation process at certain servicers, including at one or more servicers that failed to request from borrowers the additional documents and information they needed to obtain complete loss mitigation applications, only to deny the applications for missing those documents,” the report said. On the escrow front, the CFPB said at least one ...
The CFPB last week released its plan to assess the effectiveness of its mortgage servicing rule under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and is requesting public input. The bureau issued its mortgage servicing rules under RESPA and Regulation X back in January 2013, and amended the final rule on several occasions before it took effect Jan. 10, 2014. The final rule addressed six major topics: force-placed insurance; error resolution and information requests; general servicing policies, procedures and requirements; early intervention with delinquent borrowers; continuity of contact with delinquent borrowers; and loss mitigation procedures. With its assessment plan, the bureau intends to focus on how well its rule has met four key purposes: responding to borrower requests and complaints in ...
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