Next September, two months before the Presidential election, America celebrates eight years since the Treasury Department took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and turned them into wholly owned subsidiaries. Since then the federal government’s control over the nation’s housing markets has grown even greater than ever. While we’ve been waiting for policymakers to fix a broken system of housing, … Read More »

Despite months of turmoil and repeated complaints from lenders, Realtors, builders and other members of the housing lobby, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau’s Qualified Mortgage Rule enacted in 2014 has not had any significant impact on risk taking and credit availability, according to a new study by the Federal Reserve. Congress passed one of the most comprehensive financial reform laws … Read More »

‘Closed loan credit scores continued tumble, while DTI rose in October’ promised the headline from Ellie Mae this month. Eagerly I scanned through the data, hoping at last to see a relaxation of the squeaky tight lending standards for purchase loans, enough to really mean something to the millions of young buyers trying to maneuver their way through student loan … Read More »

  These times of limited affordability and changing views on credit are making it tough on lenders and even tougher on the GSEs who are the primary market for the mortgages they originate.  In an effort to reduce its risk burden by transferring more to investors in mortgage-backed securities, Fannie Mae has sharpened its pencil and put in place a … Read More »

  Purchase mortgages grew at a faster rate in rural communities than in the rest of the nation last year and rural borrowers paid significantly higher rates of interest than urban or suburban home buyers in 2014, according to an analysis of recently released data from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) by Keith Wiley, senior research associate at the … Read More »

The total number of originated mortgages of all types and purposes declined by about 2.7 million, or 31 percent, but in 2014 but home purchase lending increased by about 4 percent. Refinance originations declined by 55 percent, according to the latest Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) Data released by the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. The 2014 data include information … Read More »

  Mortgage originations rose to $466 billion in the second quarter, a 27 percent leap from the previous quarter and the fourth consecutive increase after reaching a 14-year low one year ago. according to a new report from the New York Federal Reserve. Half of the loans originated in the second quarter nearly half, $232 billion, went to borrowers with … Read More »

Anybody who works with young home buyers today knows the definition of heartbreak.   It’s when young couples with good jobs and dreams of homeownership can’t overcome the barriers to getting financing that have been erected since 2006. Of all the players still on the field today—lenders, politicians, regulators, brokers, GSEs—they are the only innocent ones.  They were in high school … Read More »

Mortgage credit availability as measured by Zillow’s Mortgage Access Index  has risen steadily over the past two years to surpass a halfway point between the depths of 2011 and the peak of the boom in August 2004. The new metric (ZMAI) combines seven sources of data: credit score data, debt to income ratios, PMI availability, quotes on Zillow’s mortgage platform, … Read More »

If you want proof that more and more middle and lower income Americans are being left behind by the housing recovery, look no farther than the latest Mortgage Bankers Association report on purchase loans. Loan sizes for purchase mortgage applications are now increasing faster than house prices. The MBA’s Weekly Application Survey for the week ending March 6, 2015 reported … Read More »