Daily Dose

The Federal Housing Finance Agency is still refinancing plenty of loans through Home Affordable Refinance Program ‒‒ in fact more HARP refinances were done in December than in any other month of 2014 ‒‒ but HARP refinances are significantly down from a year ago, even if FHFA believes it has many more potential customers out there.

There’s good news and bad news for January’s existing-home sales, according to the National Association of Realtors. On the one hand, sales in January, for the fourth straight month, were ahead of the pace of sales a year ago. On the other hand, existing-home sales in all major regions declined last month to their lowest rate in nine months, with the West and Northeast getting the worst of it.

The American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) International Center on Housing Risk reported another rise in mortgage origination risk in January, marking five straight months of increasingly risky lending. Researchers at the center say the rise in risk is due to a shift in market share from large banks to non-banks, whose practices are "substantially riskier than the large bank business."

The Conference Board reported a 0.2 percent month-over-month increase in its Leading Economic Index (LEI), putting the measure at 121.1. The index, which measures early growth signs as a gauge of future economic developments, had increased 0.4 percent in December and 0.3 percent in November.

The study was conducted authored by Gary Painter, director of USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate, and doctoral candidate Jung Hyun Choi, to determine how long declines in household formation would last following a major economic shock such as a drop in employment that occurred during the recession.

Using home price data from CoreLogic, NAHB estimated that 62.8 percent of homes sold at the national median price in Q4 were affordable to families earning the U.S. median income of $63,900. That figure was up 1 percentage point from the third quarter.

For all of 2014, Fannie reported profits totaling $14.2 billion, down from $84 billion in 2013. Like its sister company, Freddie Mac, Fannie's 2013 results got a major boost from a one-time benefit related to deferred tax assets and a surge in funds from securities settlements.

U.S. Representative Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), along with U.S. Representative Tim Walz (D-Minnesota), re-introduced the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2015, a bill that would create the position of an independent Inspector General for CFPB.

In its fifth annual survey of loan originators, national recruiting firm Hammerhouse LLC found that out of more than 800 respondents, 56 percent are finding that while they still consider their job rewarding—both personally and financially—it's now less so than it was in the past.

Freddie Mac reported Thursday that the average interest rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) was 3.76 percent (0.6 point) for the week ending February 19, up from 3.69 percent a week ago and the highest rate since 2014's final reading.