Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac single-family mortgage servicing grew at a relatively stable pace during the fourth quarter of 2016, but the nonbank share was up significantly. A new Inside The GSEs analysis and ranking shows that the two guaranteed $4.496 trillion of single-family mortgage-backed securities outstanding at the end of December. That was up 1.0 percent from the third quarter and 0.8 percent higher than at the end of 2015. But nonbanks held the mortgage-servicing rights on some $1.476 trillion of GSE single-family MBS, up 4.7 percent from the end of the third quarter. Their GSE servicing grew a whopping 18.5 percent during 2016, while banks and other depositories managed a small 0.6 percent increase.
Read More
Treasury Secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin’s recent comments that he’s not a fan of recapitalizing and releasing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and wants to find a “bipartisan solution” to GSE reform has caused speculation about what reform will look like under the Trump administration.The comments, made during his Senate confirmation hearing last week, presented a softer take on housing reform than his earlier comments suggested. Shortly after being ...
Read More
Fannie Mae is testing the market for single-family rental homes by backing a large institutional investor for the first time. In an agreement to fund up to $1 billion of collateral owned by Invitation Homes, Fannie, along with Wells Fargo Bank, issued a commitment letter to the Dallas-based company. Invitation, a subsidiary of Blackstone, is the largest single-family rental operation, with a portfolio of close to 50,000 homes that it acquired from foreclosure auctions to fix up and rent.The commitment states that the GSE will be involved in a “securitization transaction” with the SFR operator “to fund a new 10-year fixed rate mortgage loan in a...
Read More
A federal court ruled that GSE shareholders can no longer sue Fannie Mae’s accounting firm, Deloitte & Touche, and that the Federal Housing Finance Agency will take over as plaintiff in the Edwards et al v. Deloitte & Touche case. The ruling, handed down last week in the U.S. District Court of Florida, distanced shareholders from the case, and said any claims against Deloitte are the sole responsibility of ...
Read More
Freddie Mac recommends that lenders begin preparing now for the Uniform Closing Dataset mandate that takes effect on Sept. 25, 2017. The Federal Housing Finance Agency directed Fannie Mae and Freddie to provide a common industry dataset to support the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s closing disclosure. As a result, the pair developed the UCD to make sure the disclosures were accurate and to facilitate sharing of the data. Andy Higginbotham, Freddie’s senior vice president of ...
Read More
The Federal Housing Finance Agency is taking steps to explore financing personal property loans for manufactured housing and is seeking input on initiating a pilot program. Manufactured housing advocates have been pushing for greater support from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, especially in the form of establishing a secondary market for chattel lending, in which the home is not permanently affixed to the real estate and titled as personal property. The Manufactured Housing Institute has been in talks for some time with the GSEs and FHFA, making the case that chattel loan performance demonstrates that the GSEs can purchase chattel lending safely and profitably.
Read More
The Supreme Court of the United States ruled last week that Fannie Mae does not have the right to automatically transfer a case from state court to federal court under the “sue-and-be-sued” clause. In the ruling from the Lightfoot v. Cendant Mortgage Corp. case, the court rejected an argument stating that the GSE’s federal charter creates federal jurisdiction. The case was argued in November. The ruling by Justice Sonia Sotomayor reversed an earlier Ninth Circuit Court decision which stated that Fannie’s sue-and-be-sued clause in the charter enabled it to transfer state-filed lawsuits against it to federal court. But that’s not the case anymore. “Fannie Mae’s sue-and-be-sued clause is most naturally read not to grant...
Read More
With the Trump administration now officially in office, GSE shareholders are optimistic about their cases against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being resolved. Investors Unite hosted a call last week during which legal experts weighed in on the outlook for GSE shareholder cases. Plaintiffs have been arguing that a government bailout of the GSEs and the subsequent Treasury sweep were unnecessary and illegal. John Yoo, Heller Professor of Law at the University of California Berkley School of Law, said he thinks the election makes a big difference because it gives an incoming president the opportunity to review the constitutional claims of the last president and decide whether to change them.
Read More
Marking one of the first major GSE changes of the new year, Fannie Mae’s new investor reporting requirement goes into effect next week on Feb. 1. Fannie said that servicers must use the updated transaction types and formats when reporting loan activity for the February 2017 reporting period. To minimize challenges during the transition, Fannie announced a temporary moratorium on post-delivery servicing transfers with effective dates from Feb.1, 2017, through March 31, 2017. …
Read More
Keefe Bruyette & Woods questioned what would happen if the GSEs were dismantled in its recent financial podcast. Bose George, analyst with KBW, said, given the increase in guaranty fees, it’s clear that at least for higher quality loans, the private sector is ready to price just as competitively. “But we see two risks if the GSEs go away,” he said. George noted that the five trillion dollars worth of GSE MBS guarantees, which currently have no capital behind them, will need capital if that moves over to the banking system. And he said it’s safe to assume that will translate into higher mortgage rates.
Read More
Fannie Prices $1.351B CAS Deal. Fannie Mae priced its first credit risk-sharing transaction of 2017 last week, under its Connecticut Avenue Securities program. CAS Series 2017-C01, a $1.351 billion note offering, was scheduled to settle on Jan. 26, 2017. Laurel Davis, vice president of credit risk transfer, said “We saw an overwhelmingly positive response to our first deal of the year from a broad range of investors.” …
Read More