The Rural Housing Service single-family loan program ran out of loan commitment authority two months ago, but at least one lender, a division of JPMorgan Chase, is still making these federally guaranteed loans.
"Chase continues to make rural housing loans," a spokesman for Chase Rural Housing told National Mortgage News. The spokesman, however, declined to provide any details on how the bank continues to fund RHS mortgages. (Based in Deerfield, Fla., Chase is the nation's largest RHS lender.)
The RHS exhausted its $13.1 billion in loan commitment authority for the 2010 fiscal year on May 17, four months early. The U.S. Department of Agriculture extended $2.5 billion in conditional loan commitments on May 26. The current status of the RHS loan program is unclear because USDA has repeatedly ignored this newspaper's requests for an update on the status of the program.
Meanwhile, Congress is on track to increase RHS' 2% upfront premium to 3.5% to cover the cost of new loan guarantees and make the program self-funding. But the premium increase is attached to an emergency supplemental appropriations bill (H.R. 4899) that has been going back and forth between the House and Senate as lawmakers argue over its price tag.
The bill provides funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan along with domestic spending items to deal with natural disasters and government programs that are running short of funds. The House passed H.R. 4899 last Thursday for the second time just before leaving for the July 4 recess. It now goes back to the Senate, which passed an earlier version of the supplemental appropriations bill before the Memorial Day recess.
