The Department of Veterans Affairs is drafting a new policy to address ongoing confusion about its Interest Rate Reduction Refinance Loan program and ease investor anxiety. The uncertainty among VA lenders stems from the treatment of IRRRLs under the VA’s interim final rule defining what constitutes a “qualified mortgage.” That rule took...

A task force convened by the Mortgage Bankers Association proposed universal principles for loan modification programs across government guarantors, the government-sponsored enterprises and perhaps non-agency mortgages. The “One Modification” standards published late last week aim to provide servicers with a “cohesive framework” to complete loan mods when the Home Affordable Modification Program largely ends after this year. “MBA’s task force recognizes...

Five years have passed since the Federal Housing Finance Agency filed suit against 18 Wall Street firms and banks for peddling nonprime MBS to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the years leading up to the housing crisis. All of the defendants have settled or lost with one glaring exception: Royal Bank of Scotland. As for when (and if) RBS will settle, that’s a different and complicated matter. The bank is presently owned by the British government, which took control of it during the financial crisis. In other words, any settlement might entail taxpayer money and cause a political controversy in the U.K. And the bill could be...

In a potential legal coup for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholders, Federal Claims Court Judge Margaret Sweeney ordered the U.S. Treasury Department and Federal Housing Finance Agency to turn over another large batch of documents in relation to the Fairholme Funds Inc. v. United States, et al. net worth sweep case. Sweeney this week forced the government agencies to produce more documents, close to 60 this time, for the plaintiff’s attorneys. The agencies have attempted to keep the various memos, emails, presentations and other communications hidden under executive privilege. Shareholders say...

As the third quarter draws to a close without a single increase in interest rates from the Federal Reserve, 2016 is increasingly looking like 2015, when the Fed said it would raise rates multiple times sometime during the year, only to wait until its very last meeting before finally raising them. Similarly, the U.S. central bank said it would raise rates four times in 2016, and so far, it has yet to raise rates once this year. This week, Fed Chair Janet Yellen explicitly stated she expects a rate increase this year, as do a majority of voting members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee. However, since they decided to take a pass this time around, the Fed only has...

Nonbank loan administrators expanded their share of the mortgage servicing market during the second quarter, mostly capturing agency business abandoned by large banks, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Mortgage Finance. Commercial banks, savings institutions and credit unions reported a combined single-family servicing portfolio of $6.930 trillion as of the end of June, according to call reports. That was down 0.5 percent from the previous quarter despite the fact that the total depository portfolio holdings of unsecuritized mortgages increased 1.7 percent during that period. But bank, thrift and credit union loan servicing for others – typically loans held in mortgage-backed securities trusts – fell...[Includes two data tables]

Thanks to booming originations the past few months – which should translate into higher guaranty fee income – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are likely to post their strongest profits of the year in the third quarter, according to interviews conducted by Inside Mortgage Finance this week. But it’s not just higher loan production that should allow profits to soar – it’s the fact that the yield on the 10-year Treasury now stands at 1.69 percent, 21 basis points higher than June 30. The 10-year rate is...

Some residential mortgage-backed securities loan originators are moving away from performing internal post-acquisition quality control loan reviews in lieu of obtaining feedback from their whole loan investors, according to a new report from Moody’s Investors Service. “Some aggregators are relying more on their investors for quality control feedback,” said Moody’s. The ratings service identified in particular Redwood Residential Acquisition Corp. and JPMorgan Mortgage Acquisition Corp., which it said “are relying more on feedback from whole loan investors to monitor the quality of due diligence firm loan reviews, as opposed to conducting their own internal reviews, since a large portion of their acquisitions are sold in whole-loan trades.” Moody’s noted...

Industry trade groups have yet to weigh in on the CFPB’s TRID clarifying rulemaking, but the grassroots rank-and-file have, and many of them are raising more concerns and questions. For instance, Ross Miller, president of Miller Home Mortgage in Metairie, LA, complained that there are no exceptions for the three-day waiting period when there is an emergency. “I had a client whose father was quickly scheduled for open heart surgery,” he said in a comment letter. “The client was ...

The CFPB’s Truth in Lending Act/Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act Integrated Disclosure (TRID) rule has been blamed for a lot, including, most recently, producing more defects in mortgage loans. According to a new industry trends report from ACES Risk Management Corp. (ARMCO), a provider of web-based audit technology solutions for the mortgage industry based in Pompano Beach, FL, the industry experienced “a significant decrease in defects” through the second quarter of 2015. However, ...