Tag Archives: FHA

More than 2,200 homeowners who had mortgages with SunTrust and lost their homes to foreclosure in the past few years are eligible to a cash settlement worked out by the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office. North Carolina’s portion of the payout is about $21.5 million. Claim forms were mailed this week, and homeowners have until June 4 to submit a claim. The average payment will be around $850, according to Attorney General Roy Cooper.

Features of the 2015 Five Star Government Forum included keynote addresses from U.S. Congressman Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas), Fannie Mae SVP and Chief Economist Doug Duncan, and Freddie Mac Deputy Chief Economist Len Kiefer as well as Five Star President and CEO Ed Delgado's one-on-one interview with Acting FHA Commissioner Biniam Gebre.

MetLife admitted that from September 2008 through March 2012, it repeatedly certified for FHA insurance mortgage loans that did not meet HUD underwriting requirements. The bank admitted it was aware that a substantial percentage of these loans were not eligible for FHA mortgage insurance due to its own internal quality control findings.

Before the recession about 15 percent of Americans had a FICO score less than 600, while after the recession about 25 percent of Americans had the same low score, according to a study released in 2010 by Deutsche Bank. More recently, the Urban Institute and Encore Capital Group's Consumer Credit Research Institute found that one-third of consumers with credit files had debt in collection. That report, which examined TransUnion credit data from 2013, found 77 million Americans have debt 180 days past due, with the average person having about $5,178 in credit card, utility bill, or medical bill debt.

Wells Fargo is alleged to have received insurance money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development even after some loans had defaulted. The bank allegedly submitted over 100,000 FHA loans said to be under HUD compliance and eligible for insurance, knowing that the loans were too risky and did not qualify.

President and CEO of Genworth Mortgage Insurance and Chair of U.S. Mortgage Insurers Rohit Gupta testified on behalf of the Mortgage Insurance Industry (MI) at the House Financial Services Committee Housing and Insurance Subcommittee today stressing the need for balance between the roles of the Federal Housing Administration and MI when to comes to taxpayers.

The Housing and Insurance Subcommittee of the House Committee on Financial Services will hold the second hearing in the series, entitled The Future of Housing in America: Oversight of the Federal Housing Administration, Part II, on Thursday, February 26, beginning at 10 a.m. Eastern time.

The American Enterprise Institute's (AEI) International Center on Housing Risk reported another rise in mortgage origination risk in January, marking five straight months of increasingly risky lending. Researchers at the center say the rise in risk is due to a shift in market share from large banks to non-banks, whose practices are "substantially riskier than the large bank business."

First-time buyers accounted for nearly half of homebuyers taking out mortgages in January, improving just slightly from December, according to a metric released by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Isolating only the pool of purchase mortgages guaranteed or insured by the GSEs or the government, AEI estimates the share of first-time buyers was slightly higher at 56 percent.

More than one in three homeowners with mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) could stand to save money by refinancing now that the agency has lowered its annual mortgage insurance premium, according to a study released by the Urban Institute (UI).