Monday marked the implementation deadline for the Uniform Loan Delivery Dataset, the new loan-level mortgage information file format developed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for all loans sold to the government-sponsored enterprises.
Adopting the file is a requirement in the Uniform Mortgage Data Program, an initiative established by the Federal Housing Finance Agency to streamline and improve lenders’ submission of mortgage data. Monday’s deadline follows other UMDP requirements, including the submission of full, electronic appraisal reports in the Uniform Appraisal Dataset file format, using the GSEs’ Uniform Collateral Data Portal (which became mandatory on March 19).
The ULDD file was created using an XML format created by the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization. MISMO is a consortium of mortgage technologist volunteers who develop and promote standardized data definitions for industry participants. The ULDD file replaces the proprietary 2,000-character flat files that lenders submit to the GSEs via Freddie’s Selling System and Fannie’s Loan Delivery portal.
The earliest work on what's now known as the UMDP started more than three years ago, when Fannie Mae announced in May 2009 that it would develop a system to begin collecting electronic appraisals with technology called the Collateral Data Delivery portal. Freddie Mac soon followed with plans for its own appraisal delivery portal before the FHFA stepped in, consolidated the redundant appraisal projects and added a component to overhaul the GSEs single-family loan delivery file formats in May 2010.
In the more than two years since the ULDD requirement was announcement, the file format’s development has been delayed several times, most recently in December 2011,
“We had to do a lot of performance tests on the Selling System to make sure we didn’t have any degradation of performance. We spent a lot of time on the usability of the Selling System, screen flows, making sure that the additional data we’re asking for flows well for the people who are going to have to enter the data,” said Freddie Mac Chief Information Officer Robert Lux in an interview with Mortgage Technology earlier this year.
“We also basically added a whole rules component to this. A lot of the business logic that goes into the decisioning is now rules-based,” Lux continued. “The really nice thing about that is that if we’ve got these data elements and the rules can tell you what loans we can board, the idea is, obviously, to catch problems on the onset, instead of having to catch them on the back end.”
The current iteration of the ULDD file represents a scaled-down version of the dataset first introduced in June 2010. However, the GSEs still intend to collect the full dataset and will add new data points in batches moving forward.
Among the most significant of the UMDP-related goals outlined earlier this year are plans for the GSEs to assist the FHA in establishing the procedures and technology to collect electronic appraisals and for Fannie and Freddie to develop a new mortgage servicing dataset.
