By TOBIAS PETER
Last month, at the behest of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises, announced new risk-based pricing guidelines that loosen mortgage credit for higher-risk loans. Since the Federal Housing Administration traditionally serves higher-risk borrowers, this move represented the latest salvo in a renewed battle for such borrowers.
As a response, FHA is rumored to announce today (2/22/2023) a 30 bps mortgage insurance premium cut that will expose taxpayers and not help prospective homebuyers.
The last time FHFA imposed credit loosening on the GSEs in 2014, FHA responded shortly thereafter in kind with a large 50 bps MIP cut. At the time, FHA predicted that this cut would lead to 250,000 new…
By SCOTT KIMBLER The director of the AEI Housing Center at the American Enterprise Institute painted a bleak picture for the rest of this year and all of 2023 earlier this month during a presentation and forecasting of home prices in the United States. AEI Senior Fellow and Director of the AEI Housing Center Edward Pinto pointed to some major factors colliding at once that will be harming market prices, appreciation of owned homes, and the consumer ability to buy or upgrade a home at all. Those factors are inflation, which is at a 40-year-high, the Fed Fund rate continuously being raised to cool inflation, a housing shortage, and employment repercussions of the pandemic. First, the volume of homes being…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS As the spring selling season begins, people in the mortgage and real estate industries are speculating on whether 2022 will be a year of growth or the start of the end for a red-hot market that has favored sellers and forced up the price of housing in many parts of the country. Numbers from the start of the year look promising for growth. On Tuesday, S&P Dow Jones Indices released the latest results for the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Indices. A 19.2% annual gain was reported in January, up from 18.9% in December. The 10-City Composite annual increase was 17.5%, up from 17.1% in December. The 20-City Composite posted a 19.1% year-over-year gain, up from 18.6% in the previous…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS This Valentine’s Day, if your heart is broken because you keep falling in love with homes to lose them to other buyers, you are not alone. Cindy Flynn, Director of Corporate Services at Comey & Shepherd in Cincinnati, Ohio, said buyers in her market are currently submitting an average of eight offers before landing a home. Although buyers are getting a thicker skin, Flynn said, the process is still an emotional one. She suggests keeping an open mind, a positive attitude, and faith that this spring there will be more inventory available. “I hold true to the idea that everything happens for a reason,” Flynn told The Mortgage Note in an interview. “There are other fish in…
By KIMBERLEY HAAS Low-income and minority buyers will continue to be crowded out of the housing market in 2022, according to the director of research at the AEI Housing Center. The American Enterprise Institute is located in Washington, D.C., and during a webinar on Monday, Director of Research Tobias Peter said entry-level homebuyers are being replaced by borrowers with higher incomes in many markets. “When we tally up the entry-level share of all home sales, we’re finding that the entry-level, as of December of 2021, accounted for 52.7%, which is, of course, much down from before the pandemic. In December of 2019, it was at 59.9%, and when we started tracking this back in 2012, it was at 71%,” Peter…
