News

As part of its efforts to expand credit access to more borrowers, the Federal Housing Administration has introduced its "Blueprint for Access," which includes a new counseling program for borrowers using FHA-insured financing. The plan has its critics, including the American Enterprise Institute's Edward Pinto, who argues that FHA "has not stood for sustainable homeownership for at least five decades."

Now that Director Mel Watt's administration is in full swing, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has released its new strategic plan for the conservatorships of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In its outline, FHFA focused on three tenets going forward for the GSEs: maintain foreclosure prevention activities, reduce taxpayer risk, and build a new, single-family securitization infrastructure.

After staying quiet for months following his swearing-in as head of the agency, Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Mel Watt took the stage at the Brookings Institution this week to outline his own plans for the GSEs. Like FHFA's original Strategic Plan for Enterprise Conservatorships, the newly unveiled plan is built on three blocks: maintain, reduce, and build. However, Watt's revised plan suggests a shift in focus toward broadening credit access.

The Law Offices of John D. Clunk announced the firm’s own Bob Hoose has been sworn in as a board member for the Ohio Mortgage Bankers Association.

CoreLogic released Tuesday its own quarterly Case-Shiller Indexes, assembled using the company’s proprietary data supplemented with statistics from the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). While prices nationwide were up an estimated 11.3 percent in Q4, seven cities managed to shoot up into the 20 percent range year-over-year, with Las Vegas leading at 25.6 percent growth.

While this year’s first quarter was a chilly one for much of the country, the same can’t be said for Florida, where temperatures—and housing market conditions—remained fair.

Survey results released Monday show Americans—and Millennials especially—continue to have only a vague understanding of how their credit scores are calculated and used. Among other findings, fewer than half of Millennials seem to comprehend that age is not a factor in calculating credit scores, and less than two-thirds know that the three main credit bureaus collect the information on which their scores are based.

A survey of consumer expectations released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds home price change expectations are down once again, with projected growth over the next 12 months forecast at 3.77 percent. It was the third straight monthly decline.

Median existing single-family home prices kept marching up in nearly 75 percent of measured markets in the first quarter, though at a slightly lower pace, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported. NAR found the national median existing-single family home price was $191,600 in the first quarter, up 8.6 percent from the previous year.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) released its Quarterly Performance Report for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, recording continued improvements as the enterprises see more post-crash business. The Federal Home Loan Bank system had positive earnings as well, noting $2.5 billion of earnings in 2013.