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gse: FHFA nudges Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into action on short sales - 04/23/12 09:01 AM
If there ever was a nightmare for Realtors in the last few years in the housing market it was the short sale. The psychology profession is still compiling data on how many man hours of sleep per night they lose during each short sale adventure but when the official figure comes out sometime soon it must be several. It has been that bad. The current real estate recession made the short sale famous, the talk of the micro brew pub crowd. It can take months for a real estate agent to navigate one of them through all the different-size hoops the nation’s mortgage … (14 comments)

gse: Fannie Mae's new strategic default rule could amount to very little - 07/30/10 04:05 PM
Fannie Mae recently took an assertive step, in its own mind at least, to stem the growing tendency of mortgage borrowers pulling off strategic defaults. In that homeowners who could afford their payments choose to walk away from the obligation anyway. The GSE went ahead and added another category to the new policy. Home loan recipients who fail to do a workout in good faith also fall under the spell of its new guidelines. What this all means is that property owners fitting these parameters would be ineligible for mortgages backed by Fannie Mae for seven long years from the recorded … (46 comments)

gse: Fannie Mae gets tough on appraisal changes made by mortgage lenders - 07/11/10 12:18 PM
The real estate market meltdown has exposed many painful and game-changing weaknesses in how business was conducted in the years past. In the quest to make as much money as possible scores of mortgage files were pushed through with incomplete or doctored information. Now, with foreclosures the topic of the day, mortgage lenders are receiving growing demands from investors like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy back loans they originated haphazardly. That can be devastating to the bottom line.
To deal with the costly buyback menace many mortgage shops have commenced tinkering with appraisals, of all things. As an appraisal … (6 comments)

gse: Washington controls 46% of REOs today - real estate market maker for years to come - 06/30/10 02:41 PM
The housing industry is relying heavily on government-backed mortgage organizations like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and FHA for supplying financing to home buyers, filling a gaping void left by the private home loan sector still applying remedial salve to its festering wounds. Without them the real estate arena would be uniquely anemic. And the government is slowly gaining even more control over housing in a different but quite influential capacity, whether it likes it or not.
As mortgage foreclosures keep steadily spilling onto the ravaged real estate market, GSEs - Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's official designation - and its federal … (10 comments)

gse: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continue bleeding - 05/25/10 05:22 PM
The two large GSEs, or government sponsored enterprises, that provide much of the liquidity to the secondary mortgage market are trying to improve their still misbehaving portfolios. Their underwriting guidelines have been steadily getting stricter which will certainly help, but most of the benefits of that will come later. The home loans currently causing such havoc for them were originated around the peak of the real estate bubble and soon after it spectacularly blew up into small particles. Their efforts are now largely focused on putting the breaks on the losses they are presently enduring.
Mortgage lenders requested to repurchase GSE's … (6 comments)

gse: Freddie Mac's mortgage delinquencies drop a notch - 05/06/10 05:08 PM
Freddie Mac has been pummeled thoroughly in the eye of the real estate meltdown, so much so that the government finally had to take over its operations due to heavy mortgage losses. In the recent past its matters seemed to be settling down a bit but now it needs another $10 billion from Washington to cover its 1st quarter setbacks. Besides that, it also has some good news to release.
For the first time since April of 2007 Freddie Mac can report that delinquencies for single-family home loans it guarantees slipped to 4.13% in March, from 4.20% in February. Although it … (6 comments)

gse: Mortgage lenders forced to buy back bad loans - 02/02/10 05:57 PM
Mortgage paper by the millions has been lately marked with a big fire-red stamp BAD. Or some home loan industry observers prefer to use the equally merciless description TOXIC. There probably are a few other choice words floating in the media about them. Nevertheless, these mortgages in default are a major weight on the books of anyone who holds them - generally portfolio lenders and investors - and that being so, they want to get rid of them, if at all possible.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the colossal GSEs, which make up a large chunk of the secondary mortgage market, … (13 comments)

gse: Mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on death row? - 01/25/10 11:11 PM
House honcho Barney Frank feels that it's time to let these two GSEs, the home loan superstars that have for a long time dominated the secondary mortgage market, expire. Instead of trying to fix them, they should be strapped down and given some liquid that puts them to sleep.  
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, in all honesty, have had their problems lately. Years ago they were rocked by management shenanigans, including cooking the books to allow top leaders pocket fatter bonuses. Sounds familiar? More recently they have suffered heavy losses as the real estate market flew right over the cliff … (57 comments)

gse: Fannie Mae eases up on condo guidelines - Las Vegas mortgages for condominiums - 01/08/10 11:11 PM
The GSE - or Government-sponsored Enterprise - is one of the key participants in the secondary mortgage market, helping finance single-family houses and condominiums under the banner of conforming conventional home loans. During this housing downturn it has suffered some scary losses - who hasn't - and as a result has tightened its underwriting guidelines. The condo segment has been under a really tight watch during the last few years.
Now, however, Fannie Mae is initiating a fresh approach to make more condominiums eligible for its mortgage programs. It starts doing that only in Florida at this point, a state where … (10 comments)

gse: Fannie Mae accelerates mortgage buying process - 09/12/09 06:33 PM
The mortgage industry could use some good news for a change and it's getting a little bit of it from Fannie Mae, the GSE, or government-sponsored enterprise, which buys mortgage-backed securities on the secondary market. Its actions bring crucial liquidity to the vast home loan sector. Life hasn't been easy for it lately, as it struggles with a record number of foreclosures and even outright corrosion of its once untouchable mandate.
Fannie Mae is moving forward with new ideas, though, despite its troubles and criticism. The latest it came up with is to speed considerably the warehouse lending routine. A warehouse lender provides … (18 comments)

gse: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could be fossilized - 08/06/09 05:32 PM
The two dominant mortgage market makers have been struggling for years with all sorts of problems, most of them of their own making. Heavy losses led to the Federal Housing Finance Administration placing them under conservatorship about a year ago. U.S. Treasury Department is now keeping the two GSEs, or Government Sponsored Enterprises, afloat by buying their preferred stock.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may soon be extinct anyway. Moody's Investors Service feels in its latest global banking analysis report that their days are numbered as losses mount. It could happen inside the next 18 months, it predicts. And they are … (8 comments)

gse: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on the ropes - 08/19/08 10:56 PM
The two mortgage heavyweights have been the backbone of U.S. housing finance scene for decades and have provided the intended liquidity to the market. This in turn allowed more people to buy a home to live in, the ultimate goal of the system. Then in the early 2000's the real estate market grew hot, piping-hot in select states like California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, and as history suggests all out-of-control booms come to a crashing halt sooner or later. Like now. To fuel the boom, mortgage lenders, large and small, jumped head first on the housing bandwagon to make enormous amounts … (16 comments)

gse: Mortgage mess rescue discussions continue - 09/21/07 06:29 PM
Washington is in high gear again, after a long hot summer, immersed in talks about how to deal with the current mortgage dilemma. The latest round this week involved the Congress and some of the key players in the government, like the Fed chief Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Paulson.
The flavor seems to be that lawmakers are under serious pressure from the public and special interest groups to legislate a lot to help homeowners in trouble. On the other hand, the government and the lending industry favor a less interventionist approach, the basic preference being to rely more on the marketplace … (6 comments)