Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks will now be prohibited from taking on mortgages “encumbered by certain types of transfer fee covenants and in certain related securities” under a final rule issued last week by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The FHFA’s final rule, published in the March 16 Federal Register, generally applies, with some exceptions, to private transfer fee covenants created on or after Feb. 8, 2011, the publication date of the Finance Agency’s proposed rule.

Effective Sept. 1, Freddie Mac will assess a Reporting Noncompliance Compensatory Fee of up to $15,000 on servicers that fail to report on at least 75 percent of the loans they service by the fifth business day after the accounting cycle cutoff, the GSE noted in an alert to servicers last week. Freddie has upped the fine it will levy from $250 to $5,000 against any servicer that falls short of the GSE’s reporting rules. A second violation in one 12-month period will result in a $10,000 fine, previously $550.

A conservative, non-partisan public interest group has filed suit against the Federal Housing Finance Agency, claiming the FHFA has improperly denied the group’s request for documents relating to the Finance Agency’s decision to sue 17 financial institutions last fall on behalf of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over alleged misrepresentations of mortgage-backed securities.Last week, Judicial Watch filed its lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the FHFA denied the group’s Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the agency’s litigation. The Finance Agency argued that as private companies, FOIA requests do not apply to Fannie and Freddie.

The expanded Home Affordable Refinance Program barely got off the launch pad in December, but more recent data and anecdotal reports suggest that the revamped mission to help underwater Fannie and Freddie borrowers is flying higher in early 2012. Even as the government-sponsored enterprises were reporting a 5.0 percent increase in refinance activity in December, the number of new HARP loans declined by a whopping 35.8 percent from the previous month. HARP activity increased by 3.3 percent from the third to the fourth quarter of last year, but that was significantly...(Includes two data charts)

The recent Servicing Resolution Agreements signed by the nation’s top five mortgage servicers with the federal government and state attorneys general may have been clear on the cost of their key provisions but it is the enormous hidden costs of compliance that could bite the financial institutions in the long run, according to compliance experts. Following the recent announcement of the national servicing settlement, it is impossible to put an accurate dollar amount on the myriad things servicers need to do in order to comply, but experts agree that staffing, training, technological upgrades...

Home-equity lending in 2011 fell to its lowest level in more than 20 years as crumbling house prices and rigid underwriting continued to hammer away at second mortgage lending. Banks, savings institutions and credit unions reported a total of $803.6 billion of home-equity loans in their portfolios at the end of the year, down 7.2 percent from the previous December. Depository institutions accounted for the lion’s share, 92.1 percent, of the $873.0 billion home-equity market. Finance companies were the only other significant player in the market, with $49.0 billion at the...(Includes two data charts)

In a development that ultimately could affect legions of homeowners who couldn’t get a permanent loan modification, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently gave the go-ahead to a borrower class action against a mortgage servicer for not providing a permanent loan modification under the Home Affordable Modification Program. “We believe this affects hundreds of thousands of people, if not more – not just at Wells Fargo, but also with respect to other banks – who haven’t been able to get their loan modifications like they should have, given their compliance with their trial plans...

Homebuyers rely on real estate agents to recommend specific lenders in about one-third of the mortgage-financed home purchases now taking place in the U.S. housing market. And despite the fact that many real estate brokerage firms have some sort of partnership with specific lenders, relatively little business appears to be generated by these arrangements. These are some of the major findings contained in a comprehensive new study of the home purchase mortgage market and the role real estate agents play in generating mortgage business for lenders. The study, “Key Factors in the Referral of Homebuyers to...

The settlements reached by five major mortgage servicers with a handful of states over their use of the Mortgage Electronic Registration System has not weakened the legal position of MERSCorp itself, according to industry experts. The new agreements signed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman with Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Ally Financial has the banks paying a total of $25 million to the state in exchange for a release of further claims regarding the banks’ use of MERS throughout the servicing and foreclosure process and a pledge not to challenge...

A Senate subcommittee chairman has called upon the Federal Housing Finance Agency to recalculate and resubmit its principal reduction analysis to account for the Obama administration’s proposed enhanced incentives after an expert testified last week about a number of flaws in the study the FHFA used to justify its policy stance against writedowns of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, called for the FHFA do-over during a hearing of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Housing Transportation and Community Development, where Amherst Securities’ Laurie Goodman said there...