Significant price cuts to the FHA’s Streamline Refinance Program will not hurt the Mortgage Mutual Insurance Fund but will, in fact, benefit from the lower pricing in the long term, said Acting FHA Commissioner Carol Galante.Testifying last week before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies, Galante said the pricing cuts to encourage streamline refinancing as well as upfront and annual mortgage insurance premium increases for forward and jumbo mortgages will generate an additional $1 billion this fiscal year and next, in addition to projections in the president’s FY2013 budget. According to Galante, the FY2013 budget proposal ...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has issued new guidance allowing non-FHA mortgage loans to qualify for an FHA refinance loan if the lender or investor agrees to write off the unpaid principal balance of the original first-lien mortgage by at least 10 percent. The guidance expands last year’s enhancements to the FHA Short Refinance program, which allowed responsible homeowners with negative equity to refinance into a 30-year, fixed-rate FHA loan. It also extends the program until Dec. 31, 2014. Under the latest changes, underwater borrowers who may have been delinquent ...

Ginnie Mae will question certain mortgage-backed securities issuers about reporting inconsistencies in pool data submissions over the last couple of months and try to resolve those issues to avoid delay in MBS pool processing. In an audio conference with issuers last week, Ginnie Mae officials said agency staff discovered the flawed data submissions while poring over several months’ worth of pool data submitted by issuers. While most of the information fell within theVargas said the discrepancies were attributed to a small group of issuers, who will be contacted soon to work on corrections before Ginnie Mae puts stronger edits up front. She said the agency wants to ...

Origination of FHA-insured mortgage loans exceeding $417,000 were concentrated mostly in five states in 2011 even as jumbo loan production dropped further on both monthly and year-to-year bases, according to Inside FHA Lending’s analysis of the latest FHA data. California, New York, Virginia, New Jersey and Maryland accounted for 85.7 percent of the FHA jumbo market in 2011, with lenders reporting $18.2 billion in total originations, down 34.9 percent from 2010 and 2.5 percent from the third to the fourth quarter. California led all states in 2011 in FHA jumbo origination ($8.73 billion) and market share (48.0 percent). Production on a quarterly basis was ... [Two charts]

Two White House administrations and Congress have separately tried to launch three FHA programs designed to help various constituencies of distressed homeowners since the housing market began to crash in 2007, and none of them have accomplished much. Still, policymakers keep trying. The Obama administration this week announced a handful of changes to the FHA Short Refinance program in hopes of increasing volume. The program, aimed at borrowers who are current on underwater conventional loans, is also being extended through December 2014. According to the most recent FHA data available, only 2,163...

Industry experts digging through thousands of pages of legal documents associated with the $25 billion foreclosure settlement agreed to by five major servicers mostly found what they expected: a complex package of mixed forms of borrower support that the banks are expected to implement sooner rather than later. The settlements involving Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Ally Financial and 49 state attorneys general will have to be approved by the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC. Although critics found grounds for complaint about the varying incentives for loan modification and...

New issuance of agency MBS rose a modest 2.2 percent from January to February, and 2012 has started off on a somewhat stronger note than many observers had expected. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae issued a total of $116.5 billion of new single-family MBS last month – which made February the second-highest month in production since the beginning of last year. While issuance in the first two months of 2012 was down 5.6 percent from the same period in 2011, total production for this year would top $1.38 trillion at the current pace and that would be a measureable gain over...(Includes two data charts)

The refinance wave that lifted mortgage origination volume in the fourth quarter of 2011 appears to be holding steady in early 2012, according to a new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis. Average monthly securitization of refinance loans by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac increased by 3.6 percent from the fourth quarter of 2011 to the first two months of this year. That’s somewhat faster than the 1.2 percent increase in average total securitization volume by the two government-sponsored enterprises. The refi market may gain momentum in the coming months. The Mortgage Bankers...(Includes four data charts)

The Obama administration this week announced price cuts for refinancing loans already insured by the FHA in an effort to provide relief to underwater homeowners, estimating that as many as 3 million borrowers could take advantage of the program. Beginning June 11, the FHA will lower its upfront mortgage insurance premium from 1.0 percent to .01 percent for streamlined refinancing of FHA loans originated before June 1, 2009, and reduce the annual fee for such refis from 1.15 percent to .55 percent. To qualify for the streamline refinancing, borrowers must be current on their existing FHA...

Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan told lawmakers this week that the Obama administration was “encouraged” by the early activity in the revamped Home Affordable Refinance Program. And he was bullish on the prospects of HARP 2.0 picking up more volume as the program becomes fully operational by the end of this month. But available data and a new analysis by Inside MBS & ABS suggest that HARP 2.0 is not likely to generate much, if any, more volume over the next two years than HARP 1.0 did over the past three years. In fact, that was the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s...