HUD

The Houston City Council has approved up to $400 million in contracts with six firms to build new housing and repair single-family homes damaged by Hurricane Harvey.

Sales of new homes rebounded in November to the strongest pace in eight months as lower prices helped to attract more buyers.

While most single-family Federal Housing Administration lending is somewhat insulated from the government shutdown, the impasse is doing more to hurt funding in niches like nursing home loans and reverse mortgages.

With a number of affected borrowers, Freedom Mortgage has assembled a team dedicated to providing assistance for homeowners struggling to make mortgage payments.

A lapse in rental-assistance funding, an understaffed FHA and other effects of the government shutdown are causing real harm to families, said the chair of the House Financial Services Committee.

Michael Bright is resigning as acting president of Ginnie Mae to run the Structured Finance Industry Group, a trade association that's been without a CEO since Richard Johns resigned in July amid a reported split with the group's board.

Acting Ginnie Mae President Michael Bright will leave his post on Jan. 16 and will no longer seek confirmation to be the permanent head of the mortgage secondary market agency.

The agency wants mortgage servicers to extend special forbearance plans to those affected by the partial government shutdown and evaluate borrowers for loss-mitigation options.

The government shutdown is not just affecting federal agency employees' ability to make their mortgage or rent payments, it could take them out of the home buying market, Zillow said.

Borrowers and financial institutions may be feeling the strain from reduced operations at the FHA and IRS, which has suspended the release of certain income documentation during the budget impasse.