Citigroup to pay Freddie Mac $395 million on suspect mortgages

October 2, 2013 by

Citigroup to pay Freddie Mac $395 million on suspect mortgages

A Citi sign is seen at the Citigroup stall on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, October 16, 2012. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

By Jonathan Stempel

Wed Sep 25, 2013 5:39pm EDT

(Reuters) – Citigroup Inc on Wednesday said it agreed to pay $395 million to Freddie Mac to resolve claims of potential flaws in roughly 3.7 million mortgages it sold to the housing finance company from 2000 to 2012.

Citigroup, the third-largest U.S. bank, said the settlement also covers potential future claims arising from the loans bought by Freddie Mac, a large purchaser and guarantor of home loans.

The deal follows an agreement by Citigroup in July to pay $968 million to settle similar claims by Fannie Mae, the largest U.S. mortgage finance company. Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were bailed out by the federal government in 2008.

“Today’s agreement with Freddie Mac marks another important milestone in successfully resolving Citi’s remaining legacy mortgage issues,” Jane Fraser, chief executive of CitiMortgage, said in a statement.

Freddie Mac also praised the settlement. “The agreement is an equitable one that resolves legacy repurchase issues, and allows both companies to move forward,” Freddie Mac spokesman Tom Fitzgerald said.

Citigroup said the payment is covered by its existing mortgage repurchase reserves.

The New York-based bank received three federal bailouts in 2008 and 2009, and has since been shedding or scaling back in some of its higher-risk, slower-growing businesses.

Many banks including Citigroup sold millions of home loans to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, which in turn packaged them into securities that could be sold to investors.

In selling mortgages loans, banks make representations and warranties such as how well the loans were underwritten, and whether the borrowers can afford them. Banks can be forced to repurchase soured loans if those claims prove wrong.

Mounting losses from troubled loans were a key factor in the 2008 bailouts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Wednesday’s settlement does not free Citigroup from liability on servicing the loans, and excludes fewer than 1,000 loans that carry special contractual rights and obligations.

In January, Bank of America agreed to pay Fannie Mae $3.6 billion to compensate for troubled home loans and to buy back an additional $6.75 billion of loans.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Gary Hill and Leslie Adler)

 

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Obama to back mortgage finance reform to speed housing recovery

August 14, 2013 by

 

Obama to back mortgage finance reform to speed housing recovery

U.S. President Barack Obama smiles as he returns from a birthday weekend visit at Camp David to the White House in Washington, August 4, 2013. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

By Mark Felsenthal and Margaret Chadbourn

WASHINGTON | Mon Aug 5, 2013 8:03pm EDT

(Reuters) – President Barack Obama will propose overhauling the U.S. mortgage finance system in a speech on Tuesday, weighing in on a tangled and polarizing problem that was central to the devastating financial crisis in 2007-2009 and that continues to slow the economic recovery, the White House said.

Obama will propose eliminating mortgage finance entities Fannie Mae andFreddie Mac over time, replacing them with a system in which the privatemarket buys home loans from lenders and repackages them as securities for investors, senior administration officials said. The mortgage securitization process is deemed essential to the smooth flow of capital to housing markets and the availability of credit.

The government’s role would be relegated to providing some form of insurance or guarantee, and to providing oversight, according to officials and a White House statement.

The departments of Treasury and Housing and Urban Development have been working on an outline for housing finance reform. They outlined several options in a white paper to Congress in 2011.

After plunges in home values that wiped out an estimated $7 trillion in homeowner equity and wrecked many Americans’ finances, housing markets are staging a modest recovery. Obama, as part of a series of speeches pushing for steps to boost tepid economic growth, is focusing on housing issues in a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, in one of the regions hardest hit by the housing bust.

The president generally agrees with the bipartisan Senate proposal that would replace Fannie and Freddie with a system that would allow private firms to securitize mortgages, a senior administration official told reporters in a conference call. A government reinsurer of mortgage securities could backstop private capital in a crisis, the official said.

Obama would want the Senate measure to go farther in helping first-time home buyers and in making sure affordable rental housing is available, the official added.

The Senate bill, though, remains at odds with the bill advancing in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives that would liquidate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over five years and limit government loan guarantees.

RESTRUCTURING MORTGAGE SYSTEM TO TAKE YEARS

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac became dominant players in housing finance when private lending to home-buyers declined after the financial crisis. The government-backed companies own or guarantee more than half of all U.S. home loans and are critical to keeping capital flowing to lenders and borrowers.

 

 

(Reporting by Mark Felsenthal and Margaret Chadbourn; editing by Jackie Frank)

 

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Fannie, Freddie to start new securitization firm, regulator says

March 5, 2013 by

Fannie, Freddie to start new securitization firm, regulator says

A view shows the Fannie Mae logo at its headquarters in Washington March 30, 2012. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

By Margaret Chadbourn

 

(Reuters) – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will build a new joint company for securitizing home loans as a stepping stone toward shrinking the government’s role in the mortgage market, the regulator of the U.S. government-controlled firms said on Monday.

“The overarching goal is to create something of value that could either be sold or used by policymakers as a foundational element of the mortgage market of the future,” Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, told the National Association for Business Economics.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were bailed out by the government in 2008, help finance about two-thirds of new U.S. home loans. DeMarco is seeking to shrink their footprint and reduce risks to the taxpayers that support the mortgage giants.

Since they were seized by the government, the companies have drawn nearly $190 billion from the U.S. Treasury to stay afloat.

By creating a new securitization company, FHFA intends to pave the way for a single securitization platform and force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to abandon their separate systems.

The aim is to shrink the role the two government-sponsored enterprises play in the housing system in the absence of legislation from Congress or direction from the Obama administration on their future.

DeMarco said the goal is to build a single infrastructure to support the mortgage credit business.

The new company will be structured as a joint venture that is owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, DeMarco told reporters on a conference call to discuss FHFA’s plans.

He said the new joint venture is not expected to begin securitizing loans next year. Instead, the focus will be on creating the business and hiring staff. The company will have a separate chief executive and board.

DeMarco expects Congress will ultimately decide how the securitization platform is operated and whether it should be privatized.

“We are on a path to replace the outdated proprietary operational systems of Fannie and Freddie,” DeMarco told reporters. “It could be turned to some form of a market utility.”

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do not directly make loans. They provide financing to banks and lenders by purchasing mortgages, which they either keep on their books or package as securities which they then sell to investors with a guarantee.

DeMarco, in laying out FHFA’s goals for 2013, said he also plans to start reducing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s role in the housing finance system by shrinking their business by 10 percent in the loan market for multifamily homes.

Fannie and Freddie will also aim to complete $30 billion in single-family credit guarantee business in 2013, sharing some of the risk with the private market. Those transactions could include mortgage insurance or other types of debt securities.

The companies will also be required to reduce the less liquid portion of their portfolio of mortgages by 5 percent next year. This goal comes on top of an existing mandate that requires Fannie and Freddie to shrink their investment portfolios over time and turn over profits to taxpayers.

(Reporting by Margaret Chadbourn; Editing by Tim Ahmann and David Gregorio)

 

John Marcotte

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FHFA House Price Index Up 0.6 Percent in November

February 24, 2013 by

FHFA House Price Index Up 0.6 Percent in November

U.S. house prices rose 0.6 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from October to November, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s monthly House Price Index (HPI). The previously reported 0.5 percent increase in October was revised upward to a 0.6 percent increase. For the 12 months ending in November, U.S. prices rose 5.6 percent. The U.S. index is 15.2 percent below its April 2007 peak and is roughly the same as the August 2004 index level. National home prices have not declined on a monthly basis since January 2012.

For the nine census divisions, seasonally adjusted monthly price changes from October to November ranged from -1.0 percent in the East North Central division to +2.1 percent in the Mountain division, while the 12-month changes ranged from +0.5 percent in the Middle Atlantic division to +14.8 percent in the Mountain division. FHFA uses the purchase prices of houses with mortgages owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac to calculate the monthly index. Monthly index values and appreciation rate estimates for recent periods are provided in the table and graphs on the following pages.

For more information, click here

 

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Freddie Mac Economist Sees New Households Outpacing Apartment Boom

February 16, 2013 by

Freddie Mac Economist Sees New Households Outpacing Apartment Boom

In his 2013 forecast, Freddie Mac’s chief economist, Frank Nothaft, sees more than a million new households bolstering housing starts, driving apartment vacancy rates down to ten year lows and outpacing the boom in new apartment construction.

“The last few months have brought a spate of favorable news on the U.S. housing market with construction up, more home sales, and home-value growth turning positive. This has been a big change from a year ago, when some analysts worried that the looming ’shadow inventory’ would keep the housing sector mired in an economic depression. Instead, the housing market is healing, is contributing positively to GDP and is returning to its traditional role of supporting the economic recovery,” Nothaft says.

Here’s how Nothaft sees the coming year:

• Next year some regions will post faster house price gains, while some will be stagnant or see value loss fof the year, but overall, the housing recovery continue to strengthen property values and most U.S. house price indexes will likely rise by 2 to 3 percent, according to 2012 forecast from Freddie Mac’s chief economist,

• Look for fixed-rate mortgage rates to remain near their 65-year record lows for the first half of 2013 then begin rising a bit in the tail end of next year, but staying below 4 percent. In the single-family market, this means homebuyer affordability should remain very high in 2013 for those with good credit history, stable income, and sufficient savings.

• Household formation will be up. Unemployment, while still high, will likely drift down toward 7.5 percent; the resulting job and income gains will facilitate household formations – meaning that more members of the boomerang generation who have been living in their parents’ basements should start to move out. Look for net growth of 1.20 to 1.25 million households in 2013. These gains will help drive more housing construction and reduce vacancy rates further. Housing starts should be up around the 1.0 million pace (seasonally adjusted annual rate) by the fourth quarter of 2013.

• Vacancy rates have been trending lower for much of the past three years because household formations have outpaced new construction. To illustrate, in 2012, net household formations through the third quarter totaled 1.15 million but completions of newly built homes (both rental and for sale) were just under 700,000; the difference is made up by a reduction in vacancies. This trend will continue in 2013 and could bring total vacancy rates down to levels last seen a decade ago. While this is good news for property owners, tenants will likely see rents rise a bit faster than prices on all other goods.

• Refinance activity accounted for the bulk of residential lending in 2012 and will account for the bulk of it in 2013, too. But, simply put, we’ve seen the peak in refinancing. Homeowners who obtained a loan with a low mortgage rate in 2012 or refinanced through the Home Affordable Refinance Program are unlikely to refinance in 2013. Next year’s likely pickup in home sales won’t be enough to offset the coming drop in refinance activity. Consequently, total single-family originations will probably drop by about 15 percent in 2013. On the other hand, permanent financing on newly built apartment buildings, a pickup in property transactions, and refinancing of loans exiting “yield maintenance” terms are expected to increase multifamily lending by about 5 percent.

For more information, visit www.realestateeconomywatch.com

 

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