Comments by CFPB Director Richard Cordray at last week’s Mortgage Bankers Association conference in Boston indicate that the industry can expect the bureau’s diagnostic approach to enforcing the TRID rule will continue, apparently until further notice. “As I told you last year, in our examination work around compliance with this rule, we and the other regulators have pledged to be sensitive to the progress made by lenders that are squarely focused on making good faith efforts to come into compliance with the rule on time,” Cordray said. “We have also said that our approach would be diagnostic and corrective, not punitive. That is precisely what we are doing.” This means that the regulators will evaluate a company’s compliance management system ...

The CFPB said last week it will issue warning letters to 44 residential lenders and mortgage brokers that are not properly collecting Home Mortgage Disclosure Act information – data that helps the agency uncover discriminatory lending practices – and advised them to review their practices and step up their compliance efforts, if need be. The bureau said it has information that appears to show they may be required to collect, record and report data about their housing-related lending activity, and that they may be in violation of those requirements. The CFPB said it identified the 44 companies by reviewing available bank and nonbank mortgage data. The identities of the 44 firms were not provided by the agency. “Financial institutions that fail to ...

TRID Implementation Inconsistency Among Lenders Continues to Drive Title Agent Costs. The First American Real Estate Sentiment Index for the third quarter of 2016 found that lenders are inconsistently implementing the CPFB’s integrated disclosure rule, and that is driving up costs for title agents.... Mortgage Complaints Still High, But Drop Noticeably in 3Q16 From Year-Ago Levels. The latest monthly consumer complaint report from the CFPB found that mortgages remain among the top three sore spots for borrowers, but had a noticeable drop from the third quarter of 2015 to the same period this year....

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposal to clarify a number of aspects of its TRID disclosure rule does not adequately resolve most of the non-agency secondary mortgage market’s concerns about legal liability, Pacific Investment Management Company said in a recent comment letter to the CFPB. The regulation was designed to harmonize consumer mortgage disclosures, but its unintended consequences have caused big problems in the non-agency secondary market. “The [TRID] rules have raised...

Some leading mortgage technology vendors told the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau they are concerned about the resources that will be required to implement the changes the bureau wants to make to its integrated disclosure rule known as TRID. In a comment letter to the CFPB regarding its proposed rule to clarify a number of aspects of the TRID regulation, the Mortgage Vendor Regulatory Work Group raised concerns about software implementation resources, including ...

Fairholme Files Motion to Force Government to Produce Docs ASAP. Plaintiffs in Fairholme Funds Inc. v. United States, et al, filed an emergency enforcement motion this week arguing that the government is purposely taking too long to produce documents and requesting unnecessary extensions. “The defendant has repeatedly delayed complying with the court’s order,” said Fairholme in the court documents. The judge gave the government until Nov. 1 to produce the documents. Freddie prices $217M K-deal. Freddie Mac priced a new offering of Structured Pass-Through Certificates (K Certificates) that are backed by underlying collateral consisting of supplemental multifamily mortgages. The company expects to issue approximately $217 million in K Certificates, which...

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray said agency examiners are conducting “transaction testing” to assess compliance with new TRID disclosure rules. Looking at loan files is necessary to a diagnostic compliance assessment, he told a good-sized audience at this week’s annual convention of the Mortgage Bankers Association. The bureau chief repeated earlier assertions that TRID compliance reviews would be “diagnostic and corrective, not punitive.” Cordray said...

The share of home sales that experienced a delayed closing because of appraisal-related issues remained elevated in September, according to the latest Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey. Industry participants suggest that the strong market for purchase mortgages has led to a backlog of appraisals. Appraisal issues accounted...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sent the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a joint comment letter addressing the bureau’s TRID clarifying rulemaking that have to do with the government-sponsored enterprises’ Uniform Closing Dataset, supporting some provisions and opposing others. The UCD is the data standard the pair developed to support accurate disclosures on the closing disclosure and to facilitate the sharing of that information. “The GSEs believe...

Recapitalizing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is a good idea, according to the Congressional Budget Office, which said that it wouldn’t significantly change how the government-sponsored enterprises operate today, but it would help stabilize the mortgage market and the federal budget. In response to several legislative proposals calling for the GSEs to build capital, the CBO recently published a report studying the effects of an “illustrative policy option.” Fannie and Freddie capital will...