News

Millennials are leaning toward single-family homes when browsing the housing market. A recent analysis from Fannie Mae titled “Rent or Own, Young Adults Still Prefer Single-Family Homes” determined that householders aged 25-34 were more likely to occupy a single-family home in 2013 than in 2006, during the peak of the last housing cycle.

DocMagic, Inc., a provider of fully-compliant loan document preparation, compliance, eSign, and eDelivery solutions, recently announced in a press release the hiring of Edward Komski as the company's national sales manager. In his role, he will be responsible for introducing DocMagic’s entire suite of software solutions to large, enterprise-level lending organizations.

More money is being put into construction to meet constant demand from consumers. The U.S Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce announced today that construction spending for May reached an estimated amount of $1,035.8 billion, 0.8 percent increase from the revised April figure of $1,027 billion. Residential construction was at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $359.5 billion in May, 0.3 percent above the revised April estimate of $358.5 billion.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has issued a request for information regarding its consumer complaint database after going live with an enhanced version of the database last week, according to the CFPB. The CFPB's new enhanced public-facing consumer complaint database, which went live on June 25, included more than 7,700 consumer accounts of complaints that consumers have had with financial companies with regards to the way their mortgages, accounts, credit cards, debt collection, and other services are handled.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac CEOs are expected to get multimillion-dollar increases to their paycheck approved by the GSE’s regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), according to recent 8K Filings (Mayopoulos and Layton) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). On June 29, 2015, the FHFA approved changes to the compensation of Fannie Mae’s CEO Timothy J. Mayopoulos, and Freddie Mac’s CEO Donald H. Layton to address recent objectives outlined by the FHFA. Both salary adjustments will go into effect on July 1, 2015.

Many borrowers are unaware of their homebuying power and are underestimating their mortgage eligibility, according to a recent study by Genworth Mortgage Insurance, a unit of Genworth Financial, Inc. The results showed that 66 percent of the 113 lending executives surveyed feel that many borrowers who are eligible for mortgages do not feel that they can realistically purchase a home.

Fannie Mae released an update to their Private Mortgage Insurer Eligibility Requirements (PMIERs) today regarding the treatment of loans with lender-paid mortgage insurance. The PMIERS are scheduled to go into effect on December 31, 2015. Fannie Mae made updates to the PMIERS FAQs section, eligibility requirements, operational performance scorecard, quarterly portfolio and financial supplement, quarterly portfolio loan level dataset, and their selling guide.

Following the lead of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling legalizing same sex marriage nationwide, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has recently announced that it will offer home loans and other benefits to the spouses and children in all same sex veteran marriages. The U.S. Supreme Court announced on June 26, 2015 in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges that the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires a State to license a marriage between two people of the same sex and to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-State.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) listed interest rate, underwriting, strategic, compliance, and cybersecurity as the top supervisory concerns in the Semiannual Risk Perspective for Spring 2015 released Tuesday. Based on data that covers risks to banks and federal savings associations through the end of 2014, the report, which focuses on issues that post threats to the safety and soundness of OCC-regulated institutions, noted an overall decline in revenues in profitability for all OCC-supervised institutions. The four main areas of data presented in the report are operating environment, bank condition, key risk issues, and regulatory actions.

Under the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA) requirements, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is obligated to submit an annual report to Congress concerning Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s guarantee fees. According to the FHFA report, the average level of guarantee fees charged has increased since 2009, when the report began. The guarantee fees are now two-and-a-half times their previous level from 2009 to 2014.