Secondary Market

As the year comes to a close, details of the Middle Class Tax Cut and Job Creation Act are up in the air, and a few housing industry groups are speaking out about one aspect of the act. The Mortgage Bankers Association, the National Association of Home Builders, and the National Association of Realtors together composed a letter to Congress expressing concerns over a proposal to raise Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's guarantee fees to help cover the cost of extending the payroll tax cut.

Representatives from both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac upheld the companies' practice of assessing penalties against servicers who fail to meet defined timelines for processing foreclosures. Speaking at a mortgage banking conference in Dallas last week, GSE execs stressed that clearly the best outcome for both Fannie and Freddie is to keep the borrower in their home, but when that's not possible, it's critical that servicers complete the foreclosure process in a timely manner to clear bad loans from the pipeline.

Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia has thrown yet another idea into the mix for reforming the housing finance system. Isakson, himself a former real estate agent for 30 years, introduced legislation Thursday that would wean the secondary market off government support and pay taxpayers back for the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Isakson's bill would replace Fannie and Freddie with a new, temporary government-backed program to securitize mortgages. This transitional program would be turned over to the private sector after 10 years.

Servicers for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have completed almost 2 million foreclosure prevention actions for the two companies since they went into conservatorship in 2008, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency's (FHFA) third-quarter report released Wednesday. More than half of these actions have been loan modifications, and of the remainder, about 676,500 have kept homeowners in their homes. About 269,700 were short sales or deeds-in-lieu of foreclosure.

The delinquency rate for loans held in U.S. commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) fell 26 basis points to 9.51 percent in November, according to Trepp, LLC. That's the second biggest decline recorded by the firm this year, surpassed only by August's 36 point drop. The rate has now fallen in four of the 11 months of 2011. Recent declines, however, likely aren't the makings of a trend, Trepp says. The company is expecting increases in coming months as 2007 vintage loans start to reach their five-year balloon maturity dates.

We are five years through a 10-year adjustment process, Fannie Mae's chief economist Doug Duncan told attendees at the Five Star MPact Mortgage Banking Conference and Expo Tuesday morning. Dodd-Frank has 300 rules that must be implemented in the market. Regulators are only halfway through that list so far; the second half will be enacted over the next couple of years. While the market will recover, Duncan stressed that it will take time to adjust to new regulations.

Disenchanted with the lack of progress made after a year of negotiations between state attorneys general and the nation's five largest mortgage servicers, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has split from the pack and filed her own individual lawsuit. Coakley is suing Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Citi, and GMAC for what she says were ""illegal foreclosures."" The suit also names Mortgage Electronic Registration System, Inc. (MERS) and its parent company as defendants.

Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), has announced the appointments of Richard B. Hornsby, as FHFA's COO and Jon Greenlee as the agency's deputy director of the division of enterprise regulation. Hornsby served at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco for 26 years, holding a variety of senior level management and banking supervision positions. Greenlee joins FHFA from KPMG LLP, where he was the managing director in the financial services regulatory advisory practice.

The Office of the Inspector General for the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA-OIG) submitted its semiannual report to Congress reviewing FHFA's actions from April 2011 through September 2011. The FHFA-OIG pointed out several positive developments over the six-month period, including an elimination of the ""golden parachute"" compensation packages often offered to terminated GSE executives. However, these were balanced by a list of areas in need of improvement, most notably that FHFA does not conduct its own reviews of critical operations.

Home prices rose in the third quarter of 2011, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency's (FHFA) house price index released Tuesday. The index is calculated using home sales price information from Fannie Mae- and Freddie Mac-acquired mortgages. It rose 0.2 percent between the second and third quarters. Even with the marginal uptick during the summer months, FHFA's gauge shows that over the past year, home prices have fallen 3.7 percent when compared to the third quarter of 2010.