Housing

The House passed housing legislation that includes a slightly pared-down institutional investor housing ban, as well as a raft of community bank measures.

The newest version of the House housing bill would make a ban on institutional investors owning some homes less harsh than the Senate version by removing a seven year mandate on selling build-to-rent homes.

House lawmakers modified a ban on big-money investors from purchasing single-family homes, broadening the exemptions for build-to-rent properties and eliminating requirements in a Senate version of the bill that affected investors divest their holdings.

Credit risk transfers, a means by which banks can move risk off their balance sheets, earned considerable bipartisan support in a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing Wednesday.

What was once a bipartisan and broadly popular housing bill has been weighed down with a pair of provisions that banks can't support. Even with those headwinds, the bill is more likely than not to pass, but not without drawn-out negotiations between the House and Senate.

A White House executive order issued Friday afternoon directing regulators to ease Dodd-Frank compliance burdens comes as a bipartisan housing bill advances on Capitol Hill.

The Senate passed a bipartisan housing bill in an 89 to 10 vote, but how quickly and easily the bill can pass the House remains unclear.

Sens. Tim Scott, R-S.C., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., released new legislative language Monday night that includes a ban on institutional investors' purchase of single family homes and a temporary ban on the Federal Reserve issuing a Central Bank Digital Currency.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., moved to consider the housing package next week, but it's not clear what version of the bill senators will be voting on as the House, Senate and White House are still negotiating priorities.

The bill, offered by Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., and Todd Young, R-Ind., would allow Federal Home Loan bank members to establish tax-exempt community infrastructure development bonds.

President Donald Trump talked about institutional single-family home ownership and housing affordability, as well as inflation, but left credit card rate caps, debanking and even crypto alone at the State of the Union address.

A housing bill that already passed the Senate cleared the House Monday evening, but included bipartisan community banking provisions that have already raised objections in the upper chamber.

President Trump said he would prohibit large institutional investors from buying single-family homes. While the executive couldn't bar such investments on its own, a legislative ban could gain bipartisan support.

The National Defense Authorization Act will be voted on by the House without the housing package that passed through the Senate Banking Committee unanimously.

A bipartisan housing provision has emerged as a critical negotiating point for passage of an uncommonly bank-relevant defense authorization bill.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged skepticism around the central banks large-scale asset purchases during the pandemic, noting the Fed likely "should have stopped" sooner, but fell short of admitting that the purchase of MBS' contributed to housing disparities.

In a letter Friday, U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., called on Pulte to address housing unaffordability instead of concentrating on efforts to destabilize the Federal Reserve.

The Senate Banking Committee passed a housing package that includes funding for manufactured and other kinds of housing, but also includes an appraisal provision that mortgage bankers oppose.

A forthcoming bill from Sens. Jim Banks, R-Ind., and Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., would allow the Federal Housing Finance Agency director to set limits on executive pay at the Federal Home Loan banks.

Scott Turner, President Trump's pick to head the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, faced opposition from Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, but his nomination was nonetheless approved by a vote of 13-11.