The current complexion of the national housing market is prompting ""Bank of America Corp."":https://www.bankofamerica.com/ to focus on new lending measures, including taking steps toward facilitating loans that are not backed by the government-sponsored enterprises. BofA's CEO Brian Moynihan highlighted future initiatives from the financial institution during his speech at the BofA ""Merrill Lynch"":www.ml.com/ conference in New York recently, and his remarks revealed the bank's key interest in pursuing changes related to the influx of investor cash into real estate markets around the country.
[IMAGE]Moynihan noted the improvement in distressed housing that some metro regions are experiencing, and he referenced BofA's desire to create a platform to conduct GSE-free lending. Though Moynihan acknowledged that the world's major banks can no longer operate independently from the housing economy, he
[COLUMN_BREAK]emphasized the importance of BofA in helping advance mortgage lending that's not dependent on the government.
Commenting on the proverbial big picture for BofA, Moynihan said, ""We are prepared to run the business in a way where we can control our destiny and our customers even if we have to use our balance sheet to do it.""
Continuing his statements, Moynihan went on to discuss the present impact of foreclosures and distressed sales, saying, ""What we are seeing is when we get a hold of a property it moves as fast now as it ever moved. The issue is how long does it take for you to get a hold of a property. There is tons of investor money coming in. When you have the ability to get those properties, you are seeing market by market those improvements come. The process has been slower and slower in some places, but in places like Arizona and California, we are seeing it move through.""
While on stage at the conference, Moynihan also talked about the legacy mortgage servicing issues BofA is dealing with, pointing out the bank's dropping number of grevious delinquencies during the past three quarters. He went on to mention that, three years into BofA's utilization of narrower underwriting standards, the financial institutions was beginning to experience calculable benefits.
""You can see the delinquencies are much lower than what we have projected in tougher times. The underwriting since then has been substantial down payments, substantial documentation and substantial debt to income payments,"" Moynihan stated.