Freddie Mac’s Delinquencies Decline for Fourth Straight Month

The percentage of home loans going unpaid is steadily declining for the nation's second largest mortgage company.
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""Freddie Mac"":http://www.freddiemac.com reported Tuesday that its single-family seriously delinquent rate decreased to 3.63 percent in March. That's down 15 basis points from 3.78 percent in February.

It's the fourth consecutive month that the GSE has seen serious delinquencies â€" loans that are 90 or more days past due â€" head south.

With only a few intermittent blips upward in the rate over the last year, Freddie has recorded a drop in its seriously delinquent rate in nine of the past 12 months.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a

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letter last month to Edward DeMarco, acting director of the ""Federal Housing Finance Agency"":http://www.fhfa.gov which oversees the McLean, Virginia-based Freddie Mac and its sibling GSE ""Fannie Mae"":http://www.fanniemae.com in Washington, D.C.

Issa requested DeMarco send him documentation on home loans purchased by the two mortgage giants and the underwriting standards in place over the last two years in order to assess if Freddie and Fannie were in the business of scooping up high-risk, low-quality mortgages.

Officials at Freddie Mac have maintained that the new single-family business the company acquired in 2009 and 2010 “continues to demonstrate strong credit quality based on borrower credit scores and loan-to-value ratios.”

In a report issued last week protesting the lack of credit available to homebuyers these days, the ""National Association of Realtors"":http://www.realtor.org cited data showing that the average credit score for both Freddie Mac- and Fannie Mae-backed mortgages has risen to 760, up from 720 in 2007 â€" new lending criteria that Freddie officials say is helping to mitigate delinquencies.

In its ""monthly summary report"":http://www.freddiemac.com/investors/volsum/pdf/0311mvs.pdf for March, Freddie also stated that its loan modifications totaled 12,141 last month and 35,158 for the three months ended March 31, 2011.

The GSE also reported that single-family refinance-loan purchase and guarantee volume was $19.4 billion in March, reflecting 72 percent of the month’s total mortgage purchases and issuances.