The U.S. Supreme Court plans to hear oral argument on Jan. 21, 2015, in the disparate-impact case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. The fundamental legal issue in the case is whether disparate-impact claims are cognizable under the Fair Housing Act. As far as the facts of the case go, the dispute involves a statutory challenge to the allocation of low-income housing tax credits. The TDHCA distributes the tax credits associated with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program throughout Texas. The ICP is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that works to place low-income, mostly African-American Section 8 tenants in Dallas’s more affluent and largely white suburban neighborhoods. The ICP brought suit against TDHCA back in ...
The CFPB’s updated semi-annual regulatory agenda is out, and one of the tidbits it contains is that the joint agency final rule on minimum requirements for appraisal management companies is expected sometime this month. The CFPB is working on the rule with the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and the National Credit Union Administration. The rule is designed to implement the appraisal-related amendments to the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act mandated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. “Work to issue a final rule to implement the Dodd-Frank Act’s AMC amendments to FIRREA is ongoing,” said the CFPB’s updated agenda. ...
Special servicers continue to outperform the big banks when it comes to dealing with distressed mortgages, and that bodes well for the future of transferring distressed servicing rights, according to a new report by analysts at Compass Point Research & Trading. “Servicers have been under a ton of scrutiny in the past several quarters due to their servicing practices,” the analysts said, based on their review of homeowner complaints to the CFPB. “However, as the complaint data show, the special servicers screen as being significantly better at servicing distressed mortgages compared to the big banks.” According to their analysis, US Bank (18.2 percent), PNC Financial (14.8 percent) and SunTrust (11.3 percent) have had the highest level of complaints per delinquent ...
Industry representatives might be interested to know that the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research is working with the CFPB on some key regulatory initiatives. For instance, the OFR is providing technical support to the CFPB and other regulators to create a universal mortgage loan identifier to promote transparency, data aggregation, comparability, and analysis in the home mortgage market, the office said in a new report. The Dodd-Frank Act authorized the bureau to collect more data about individual mortgage loans and to mandate that entities reporting data under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act provide a universal loan identifier for each loan or application that they are required to report. The OFR published a working paper on this subject in late ...
The provision, expected to raise $30 million for FHA quality assurance efforts, would allow the Department of Housing and Urban Development to charge a fee of no more than 4 basis points.
New issuance of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae single-family MBS fell 13.7 percent from October to November, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis of loan-level data. The three agencies produced $80.23 billion of single-family MBS last month, the lowest amount since June. November also marked the first monthly decline in new production after seven consecutive monthly gains that started in April. All three agencies saw...[Includes two data charts]