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Ginnie Mae has launched a new Low- to Moderate-Income (LMI) disclosure designed to augment the LMI Geographical disclosure released in May 2021. This development is in response to investor interest in having greater transparency into Ginnie Mae mortgages in pools, in particular as part of meeting Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) investment mandates.
Ginnie Mae has worked with government-insuring agency partners to provide borrower monthly pool-level LMI disclosures. The new disclosures capture the number of underlying loans made to LMI borrowers, the percentage of LMI loan count of total loan count, the unpaid principal balance (UPB) of LMI loans in the mortgage-backed security (MBS), and the percentage of LMI UPB of total MBS UPB. LMI households are classified according to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council Median Family Income Report Tables corresponding with the time of loan origination. These disclosures are being provided at the aggregate pool level for Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) loans originated beginning in 2012.
To achieve this new data disclosure, Ginnie Mae finalized a Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) with FHA and VA in Q1 of 2023. Ginnie Mae will continue to collaborate with government-insuring agency partners to provide this LMI disclosure across the entirety of its single-family MBS program.
“This is another important step forward in our ESG efforts and serves as a proof of concept for a foundational principle of the growing social investment movement; that, under the right circumstances, financial markets can drive transformational and lasting change for the public good,” said Ginnie Mae President Alanna McCargo. “Providing market participants with the tools and data to discern the social impact of their investment decisions supports our overall mission to continue finding new ways to support sustainable and equitable housing opportunities for the communities we were built to serve.”
The new disclosure data will be published on the sixth business day of every month, for the prior month’s issuances, and made available in the Disclosure Data Download section of the Ginnie Mae website.
Ginnie Mae’s mortgage-backed securities (MBS) portfolio outstanding grew to $2.280 trillion in December, including $31.14 billion of total MBS issuance for the month of December, leading to $19 billion of net growth and a new record end-of-year balance.
