Tag Archives: Fannie Mae

According to the report, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exceeded their $90 billion risk transfer goal. During 2014, the two Enterprises executed credit risk transfers on single-family mortgages with unpaid balance transfers of over $340 billion. As part of the FHFA requirement both enterprises continued to reduce their mortgage portfolios. As of December 2014, Freddie Mac’s portfolio stood at $408 billion and Fannie Mae’s stood at $413 billion, for a combined reduction of $131 billion. Both numbers were significantly under the $470 billion cap required by the Senior Preferred Stock Purchase Agreements.

A hugely profitable year in 2013 for both Fannie Mae ($84 billion) and Freddie Mac ($49 billion) shifted widespread speculation from winding down the two GSEs to instead ending FHFA's conservatorship of the two Enterprises, which began in September 2008 after the two received a combined $188 billion from Treasury in bailout funds.

Recent actions by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) indicate that the Agency is placing an increased emphasis on the clearing out of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's seriously delinquent loan portfolios and steering more borrowers toward foreclosure prevention and loss mitigation actions, using foreclosure only as an absolute last resort.

FHFA is said to be seeking $1 billion in damages over losses the Agency suffered when the sponsor of the mortgage-backed securities, Nomura, and the securities' underwriter, RBS, did not follow underwriting guidelines on 68 percent of a sample of a bundle of securities backing more than $2 billion worth of mortgages sold to the GSEs prior to the financial crisis of 2008.

Consumers were more optimistic toward the economy than they've been at any point in the last five years, according to Fannie Mae's February 2015 National Housing Survey released Monday. The percentage of respondents who said they believe the economy is on the right track increased by 3 percentage points since January's survey up to 47 percent, an all-time high since the survey began nearly five years ago.

The U.S. unemployment rate dropped down to 5.5 percent in February, its lowest figure since May 2008, as 295,000 jobs were added, according to the February 2015 Employment Situation released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday.

Ocwen Financial has signed a letter of intent to sell the mortgage servicing rights for $45 billion worth of Agency performing loans, according to an announcement on Ocwen's web site late Monday night. The portfolio consists of about 277,000 performing loans owned by Fannie Mae. The approximate unpaid balance of the loans is approximately $45 billion. According to the announcement, Ocwen expects the deal to close by the middle of the year.

In an ongoing effort to reduce the number of non-performing loans (NPLs) in the portfolios of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and transfer risk to the private sector, the GSEs' conservator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), on Monday announced enhanced requirements for the sales of NPLs by the GSEs. Freddie Mac has sold severely delinquent loans through two transactions in the past six months, one that totaled $596 million in unpaid balance (UPB) in August 2014 and one in February 2015 that covered $392 in UPB.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should take on more risk-sharing transactions, according to a vast majority of survey respondents in the March 2015 Mortgage Industry Outlook Report released Monday by The Collingwood Group and The Five Star Institute.

Fannie Mae's Book of Business decreased in January, but the GSE's gross mortgage portfolio experienced a rare expansion, according to Fannie Mae's January 2015 Monthly Volume Summary released Friday. After dropping by almost $11 billion from November to December and declining in 53 of the last 54 months, Fannie Mae's gross mortgage portfolio expanded in January at a compound annualized rate of 3.5 percent, from $413.3 billion up to $414.4 billion. It was the first time the portfolio expanded from month to month since December 2012 and only the second time since June 2010.