Mortgages

The House Financial Services chair is sponsoring a bill with one of the Democratic presidential contenders aimed at alleviating the public housing capital backlog.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is scrapping a capital proposal it released last year and will seek comments on a new plan in 2020.

With economic expansion expected to keep churning through at least the first half of next year, Fannie Mae upwardly revised its single-family mortgage origination outlook for 2019 and 2020.

Lenders have bundled more than $18 billion worth of non-QM, private-label loans into bonds this year that they then sold to investors, a 44% increase from 2018 and the most for any year since the securities became common post-crisis.

The Federal Housing Financial Agency's latest report on credit risk transfers shows Fannie Mae continues to slowly improve a multifamily mortgage risk-sharing metric that lags Freddie Mac's by a wide margin.

The percentage of recent mortgage borrowers with subprime credit scores still resides in the single digits, but nearly doubled what is was in 2013, according to TransUnion.

And the government-sponsored enterprises could hold initial public offerings in 2021 or 2022 to ensure they hold adequate capital, FHFA Director Mark Calabria said.

A proposal by a single utility threatens to upend California’s sweeping mandate requiring solar panels on almost every new home.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s exemption from the Qualified Mortgage rule is on borrowed time, but a House bill would allow lenders to use the mortgage giants’ guidelines for documenting borrower income.

The sponsors of the Class A structure, deemed a “trophy asset” by Kroll Bond Rating Agency, are placing $825 million of a $1.2 billion whole loan into a transaction dubbed CPTS 2019-CPT.

The dollar volume of mortgages guaranteed by the Department of Veterans Affairs rose nearly 9% in the past fiscal year as interest-rate reduction refinancing loans surged nearly 75%.

The share of severely underwater mortgages shrunk by over two percentage points compared with a year ago, as these borrowers benefited from the rise in equity levels, Attom Data Solutions said.

An increase in credit risk transfer activity since 2015 signifies a sea change for private mortgage insurers that may be about to intensify, according to an industry trade group.

Sixty percent of the loans were underwritten with just 12- or 24-month bank statements, according to ratings agency reports.

The San Francisco fintech company has agreed to pay a $110,000 fine for failing to comply with a 2017 state law that requires mortgage servicers to be licensed.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is seeking comment on a proposal that could pave the way for potential Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac competitors to use the uniform mortgage-backed security structure.

Freddie Mac is now forecasting back-to-back years of $2 trillion in mortgage loan originations rather than a drop-off in 2020.

A risk management model revision that decreased single-family loan-loss allowances and a strong mortgage lending environment contributed to consistent earnings results at Fannie Mae in the third quarter.

When it comes to possible new competitors in the secondary market, the heads of the two current outlets more than welcomed the possibility of additional players in their space because of housing finance reform.

Ginnie Mae is looking for input on its proposed guidelines for electronic promissory notes and other mortgage documents that it plans to test through a digital collateral pilot.