Compliance & Regulation

The National Association of Home Builders is exploring several ideas to replace Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the secondary market, including one option that would give the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks the green light to securitize safe and sound conventional mortgages.

The types of entities facing violations of the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control's prohibited list has been growing recently to include not only mortgage-related players such as banks and commercial real estate entities, but also a homeowner association, according to an Attus Technologies Inc. executive.

Negative equity and home price volatility have turned home price protection into a desirable yet unattainable option since protecting local housing markets from future devaluation is a challenge few insurers are willing to take on.

Here's a taste of a story appearing in the Monday edition of National Mortgage News: Brian Simon, CEO of Caliber Funding, in a recent interview predicted that his company could grow originations by threefold or fourfold in 2012.

Last week's blog focused on clarifying the rules for producing branch managers. This week, we will discuss some creative compensation strategies. My preferred way of compensating producing branch managers is to set them up on a traditional profit and loss model, but treat the "profit" as a fixed amount of basis points per loan amount. In other words, all expenses remain deductible.

The speed at which fraudsters attack and alter their tactics is changing the game in card fraud prevention, making real-time monitoring much more essential.

Lenders increasingly want to control the marketing done by individual originators due to increasing industry compliance concerns, according to one vendor in the space.

While MERS QA is neither unreasonable nor unexpected, the challenges uncovered in the race to comply are significant. Never before has the industry asked servicers to ensure the data of originators.

Fitch Ratings in a recent report said it believes the Federal Housing Finance Agency's recent strategic plan for the government sponsored enterprises, which includes improved loan level reporting on securitizations, has positive potential for both agency and private label residential mortgage-backed securities.

"Out of the river there came up seven cows, sleek and fat, and they grazed among the reeds. After them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile...And the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek, fat cows." - Genesis 41