The following is an excerpt from the July edition of Mortgage Technology magazine. To read the full story and much more,
After a series of delays and setbacks, the government-sponsored enterprises launched the Uniform Collateral Data Portal on June 27.
As lenders and their vendors work out the kinks ahead of the new requirement, the GSEs are providing help with a series of FAQs posted on their websites. But arguably the most frequently asked question still hasn’t been answered—what are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac going to do with the data once they begin collecting it?
“This is pretty valuable data when you think about it,” said Jennifer Miller, executive vice president of products at a la mode, a provider of mortgage and appraisal technology based in Oklahoma City. “There are companies out there that make a lot of money off selling public records data, which is simply data about each property. If you overlay recent appraisal data on top of it, then it could be even more valuable. So, the sky’s the limit on what can be done with the data.”
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac either don’t know or aren’t saying how they will use the appraisal data. The goal of the UMDP is to promote better loan quality, but both Fannie and Freddie declined Mortgage Technology’s requests for comment on how collecting the appraisal data accomplishes that task. Likewise, the GSEs are staying mum on whether they have any intentions to somehow monetize the data or make it available to the public.
In the absence of any guidance or clarity, speculation is rampant—particularly among appraisal industry participants concerned that they could be helping the GSEs build a property database that, if handled the wrong way, would be an assault on their profession.
This policy of silence is disconcerting to those who point to the federal government’s “sponsorship” of the GSEs growing in each passing quarter and believe that the $145 billion in credit already committed to Fannie and Freddie is justification for them to operate with the same level of transparency required from government agencies—including making the data collected by the UCDP available to the public.
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