In accordance with the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced Friday that it has proposed a rule to establish new housing goals for 2015 through 2017 for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. For single-family housing goals, FHFA is requesting comment on three alternative approaches. The first alternative involves using Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data to calculate both a prospective benchmark level and a retrospective market measure; the second alternative involves setting only benchmark levels; and the third involves setting only the retrospective market level measure.
Under the first alternative, prospective benchmarks for the percentage of all single-family purchases would remain at their current levels of 23 percent for low-income families and 7 percent for very low-income families for 2015 through 2017, encouraging the GSEs to promote more "safe and sound lending" to low-income borrowers. Under the second alternative, single-family benchmark levels would be lower than the levels that have been proposed; and under the third alternative, prospective benchmark levels would not be set.
In Fannie Mae's July 2014 Monthly Summary released Friday, the GSE reported that July's serious delinquency rate of 2.0 percent for single-family properties is the lowest it has been since October 2008. The percentage of single-family properties that were in serious delinquency, which is defined as having a mortgage loan where the payment is more than three months overdue or the property is in foreclosure, experienced a month-over-month decline from 2.05 percent from June and a drop from 2.7 percent from July 2013.