Tag Archives: Freddie Mac

Monthly refinance numbers moved in fits and starts throughout 2014, bouncing between a low of 105,059 in March and October's year-to-date high—though the trend in the year's latter half was largely upward as mortgage rates fell to nearly 4.0 percent.

Among the goals in that category are instructions for the GSEs to finalize their rep and warranty frameworks (a process started late last year), encourage more participation from smaller lenders, and continue watching for other hurdles to credit access.

In a report released Monday morning, Fitch outlined five big events—all of which have taken place in the past few months—that, taken together, "could have a relatively meaningful impact on home buyer psychology, pent-up demand and housing trends in 2015 and beyond," the company says.

Real estate economist and former HUD policy advisor Raphael W. Bostic has been elected as a director on Freddie Mac's board of governors, according to an announcement from the GSE.

An online petition calling for the end of the Federal Housing Finance Agency's conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has been posted to the White House's "We the People" Web page.

The national MiMi value stands at 74.5, which is up 0.12 percent from September to October and up 0.42 percent over the past three months. Year-over-year, the national housing market has improved 4.48 percent. While still well short of the all-time MiMi high of 122.5, reached in June 2006, the national index is markedly better than it was in September 2011, when the housing market was at 60.3.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has released a statement warning organizations that label mortgage loans with "super-priority lien" status that such loans will not push loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into the secondary position. The warning was aimed mainly at energy retrofit financing programs and homeowners associations that attach super-priority lien status to mortgages because of the risk they pose to taxpayers while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are under conservatorship.

Both foreclosure completions and foreclosure starts on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans continued their steady decline in the third quarter, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)'s Q3 Foreclosure Prevention Report released Monday. The GSEs completed 39,100 foreclosures in Q3, down 9 percent from the 43,000 that were completed in Q2, according to the report.

After slipping in October, purchase and issuance activity picked up again, coming to $29.5 billion, Freddie Mac reported. That was offset by an increase in sales and liquidations, which whittled the portfolio's monthly increase to about $614 million. In other monthly changes, the unpaid principal balance (UPB) of Freddie Mac's mortgage-related investments portfolio fell by approximately $4.7 billion last month, a negative annualized growth rate of 14.0 percent.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have completed approximately 3.3 million foreclosure prevention actions in the last six years, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)'s Q3 Foreclosure Prevention Report released Monday. Including the 72,700 foreclosure prevention actions completed by the GSEs in the third quarter, the two Enterprises have performed about 3.3 million such actions since the start of the conservatorship under FHFA in September 2008, according to the report. Nearly 2.8 million of those borrowers were able to stay in their homes as a result of receiving assistance from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.