Matrix Blog

[Source: WSJ, click to expand]

Roughly 90% of the residential market has passed through Fannie and Freddie since the onset of the financial crisis. Reliance on these institutions was only around 50% before the crisis – and are they making a lot of money for the federal government right now. I’ll leave out the part where FHA stepped in to pick up the high risk slack. The private secondary mortgage market was obliterated by the credit crunch/housing crash and in the half decade that has passed, investors are just now dipping their toes in the water.

There is a great summary piece by Nick Timiraos at WSJ: “What Can Take the Place of Fannie and Freddie” on the proposed Fannie and Freddie “overhaul.”

Big Dumb Banks
As my friend Barry Ritholtz over at Big Picture once told me that the former GSEs are merely “Big Dumb Banks.” In other words, they do as they were told.

Swapping them with another alphabet soup named agency doesn’t solve the problem. In fact, I contend that replacing Fannie and Freddie completely would likely create more problems since little if anything has been done to reduce the systemic risks that nearly brought down the financial system – and whose impact are still being felt by most Americans today.

If we can agree that Fannie and Freddie created a stable mortgage market environment for decades (Fannie since the Depression and Freddie since the 1960s) and then blew up in the recent decade or more (problems began back in late 1990s), there are clearly other issues in play. I’ve always seen Fannie and Freddie as the symptom not the cause of our current economic problems.

Fixing the symptom may make some feel better, but it does nothing to reduce the probability of a systemic credit collapse. The bailout of the GSEs was a result of policy from Washington – the congress, the executive branch and both political parties who in various ways encouraged proactive neutering of regulatory powers, allowed the revolving doors of regulators with Wall Street, allowing Wall Street to compete directly with commercial banks with mind boggling leverage, limited separation of competing interests (ie rating agencies and investment banks) and incentivizing a shifting culture to serve the shareholders over the taxpayers.

I suspect that last point is the impetus for this bi-partisan proposal – reduce the risk exposure to the taxpayer by getting the private market to take over. Congress clearly has an image problem that it is trying to fix as of late (until mid-terms).

Setting Standards to Follow
One of the under appreciated functions of Fannie Mae and to a lesser degree Freddie Mac, was to serve as the leader to the private mortgage market. When Fannie Mae adopted a standard or policy, the private market (ie jumbo mortgage investors), followed their lead. With Fannie and Freddie floating in limbo with a potential looming overhaul, it’s hard to imagine a robust private market developing anytime soon. This would be a completely new institution that would replace and reinvent the former GSEs, you simply invite anywhere from chaos to uncertainty into the financial system and instability to the housing market, a key economic engine for the economy.

The whole plumbing of the mortgage market runs through these companies. You can’t just take these things away without having a very clear and specific view about what’s going to replace them,” said Daniel Mudd, Fannie’s former chief executive, in an interview last year.

No real alternative to the system has been proposed that I’m aware of and this is really window dressing to show bi-partisanship in Washington. There is no time frame proposed and very little details to reinvent the secondary mortgage market have been brought forward.

Here’s a great podcast from WNYC called “Money Talking” featuring Heidi Moore and Joe Nocera covering the proposal.

Key Issues to Fix
The WSJ piece summarizes the key issues that need to be address quite succinctly:

• Make the “implied” guarantee explicit and require any successors to Fannie and Freddie to pay a fee for that guarantee.
• Get rid of those investment portfolios, or shrink them to the point where they don’t create systemic risks.
• Require more capital and tighter regulation, since too little of both is what got Fannie and Freddie into trouble.

The trouble is, the solution to over-reliance on Fannie and Freddie is too complex for Congress to solve in this era of gridlock. Record revenue being generated by the former GSEs make long term solutions unobtainable for now. I don’t see how any major changes can be inserted into the financial systems for a long time.

Tags: Fannie Mae, Barry Ritholtz, GSE, Big Picture Blog, Nick Timiraos, WSJ, Freddie Mac

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It’s time to share my Three Cents Worth (3CW) on Curbed NY, at the intersection of neighborhood and real estate in the capital of the world…and I’m here to take measurements.

Check out my 3CW column on @CurbedNY:

In this week’s column, I thought I’d look at something near and dear to our economic hearts: tracking rental versus mortgage payments in Manhattan. Above, you’ll find Manhattan’s median sales price for co-ops and condos, as well as median rental prices, plotted against a theoretical monthly mortgage payment. At first I was using this to present the rent-or-buy decision, but the visual became a little more than that.

For the mortgage payment estimation, I used generic defaults of 20 percent down and 30-year fixed Freddie Mac mortgage rates using median sales prices as the anchor—understanding that a 20 percent down payment has not been a constant over the past 20 years. Although I’m only tracking principal and interest on the payment, I’m not factoring in the tax deduction either, so the offset is somewhat reasonable in this simple visual. Here’s what I found:…

[click to expand chart]

My latest Three Cents Worth column on Curbed: Looking At Manhattan’s Mortgage History [Curbed]

Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed NY
Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed DC
Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed Miami
Three Cents Worth Archive Curbed Hamptons

Tags: Three Cents Worth, Curbed NY, Rent versus Buy, 3CW, Freddie Mac

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American Banker has a great slideshow on catchphrases that evolved during the financial crisis. Check it out. Some of my favorites are:

Structured By Cows – “We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it,” said an S&P analyst discussing a questionable securitization that a colleague called “ridiculous.”

High Speed Swim Lane, or HSSL Countrywide’s way of describing the way they stripped QC of loans going to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Friends of Angelo Named for Countrywide’s CEO Angelo Mozilo in which government officials like Chris Dodd (ie Dodd-Frank) got better mortgage terms than they should have.

Close More University Subprime lender New Century (out of business) brought together mortgage brokers to encourage them to throw away any standards to bring more volume.

Jingle Mail When borrowers mailed their keys to the bank if they were hopelessly underwater.

Liar’s Loans Standard mortgage industry practice that encouraged borrowers to exaggerate their qualifications in order to get the loan.

Incredible and hard to conceive of now but this was common practice only a mere 5 years ago.

Tags: American Banker, Fannie Mae, Sub-Prime, Freddie Mac

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I have a conversation with Mark Willis, a Resident Research Fellow at the Furman Center for Real Estate & Urban Policy at New York University.

He is the co-author of Improving U.S. Housing Finance through Reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Assessing the Options along with Ingrid Gould Ellen and John Napier Tye.  This white paper was completed as part of the What Works Collaborative, a foundation-supported partnership that conducts timely research and analysis to help federal, state and local housing policy-makers frame and implement evidence-based housing and urban policy agendas.

The paper is essential reading as we go through a period of financial reform.  The report is described as a timely assessment of alternative proposals for the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, ranging from nationalization to dissolution.  The paper explains the role Fannie and Freddie have played, explores the goals a healthy secondary market for both single- and multifamily housing should serve, and develops a framework to help understand and evaluate the various proposals for reform.

Check out the podcast.

The Housing Helix Podcast Interview List

You can subscribe on iTunes or simply listen to the podcast on my other blog The Housing Helix.

Tags: Fannie Mae, Furman Center, GSE, Freddie Mac

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[click to open paper]

The NYU Furman Center for Real Estate released a white paper: Improving U.S. Housing Finance through Reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Assessing the Options by Ingrid Gould Ellen, John Napier Tye and Mark A. Willis that lays out possible paths to take. They also lay out the functions they serve and were intended to serve.

Wow.

A great primer on Fannie and Freddie.

After facing insolvency one year ago, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed in government conservatorship in September 2008. The Obama Administration’s recently released report on financial regulatory reform calls for a “wide-ranging process” to explore options for the future of the GSEs. The Furman Center, in cooperation with the What Works Collaborative, has conducted research to better understand six primary options for the future of the enterprises, ranging from nationalization to dissolution. This white paper provides an overview of the U.S. housing finance system and the basic operations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before conservatorship. It then discusses the basic goals of a healthy secondary market for both the single- and multifamily market, and offers a framework to help to describe and understand the different proposals for reform. Finally, it looks in detail at some of the specific proposals now emerging for reform of the housing finance system. As the federal government contemplates the future of these two entities, we hope that this paper offers a useful framework to evaluate the alternative proposals.

The GSEs were fundamentally flawed institutions because they were accountable to two parties: shareholders and taxpayers – shareholders as privatized institutions and taxpayers because of the assumed federal backstop. Both parties ended up being crushed by bias favoring shareholders and scramble for market share during the housing boom.

They serve an essential function of creating liquidity for lenders by freeing up their capital to lend more through buying mortgage securities, stabilizing mortgage rates and establishing standardization for the secondary mortgage market. But they are hemorrhaging now with no concrete solution in sight.

There are a lot of good ideas in the paper (I’ve read it twice, and will look at a few more times).

Not to go all regulatory crazy here, but I like the concept of regulating underwriting:

The industry needs to be regulated as to its underwriting standards, the quality of the underwriting process, operational risk, the level of capital/reserves, and even the quality of its servicing of the mortgage loans and the rating of its securities.37 The ability to regulate these entities effectively would be facilitated by requiring, for example, that all securitizers be licensed or chartered. Such a regulatory system/environment would help guard against the proliferation of toxic products, poor quality controls, and unfair and deceptive marketing practices, and thereby prevent the kind of race to the bottom that we have just witnessed, in which safer products are driven out of the market place.

It’s going to be a work in progress, I’m afraid.

Tags: Fannie Mae, Furman Center, GSE, Freddie Mac

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I was provided an interesting solution to the AMC appraisal issue from Tony Pistilli, a certified residential appraiser who has been employed for over 25 years in the appraisal area, at governmental agencies, mortgage companies, banks and has been self employed.

He wants appraisers to get the word out. His solution is compelling.

Anyone who reads Matrix knows what I think of the Appraisal Management Company and the Home Valuation Code of Conduct (HVCC) problem in today’s mortgage lending world.

Here’s a summary of the his article before you read it:

• Appraisers, Realtors, Brokers HATE the HVCC.
• AMC’s and Banks LOVE the HVCC.
• Regulators are disconnected from the problem just like they were when mortgage brokers controlled the ordering of appraisals during the credit boom.
• Appraisers and borrowers are paying for services the banks receive.
• Banks should pay for the services received from the AMC’s.
• Appraiser’s fees should be market driven.
• Banks should be held accountable for the quality of the appraisal.

AMC/HVCC appears to violate RESPA (Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act) since a large portion of the appraisal fee is actually going for something else coming off the market rate fee of the appraiser.

(RESPA) was created because various companies associated with the buying and selling of real estate, such as lenders, realtors, construction companies and title insurance companies were often engaging in providing undisclosed Kickbacks to each other, inflating the costs of real estate transactions and obscuring price competition by facilitating bait-and-switch tactics.

The Ultimate Solution for the Appraisal Industry

by Tony Pistilli, Certified Residential Appraiser and Vice-Chair, Minnesota Department of Commerce, Real Estate Appraiser Advisory Board, Minneapolis, Minnesota
—
Since the inception of the Home Valuation Code of Conduct (HVCC) in May 2009, there has been much discussion, and misinformation, about the benefits and harm caused by the controversial agreement with the New York Attorney Generals office and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. This agreement, originally made with the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, requires Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to only accept appraisals ordered from parties independent to the loan production process. Essentially, this means, anyone that may get paid by a successful closing of the loan cannot order the appraisal.

In the past 6 months while the Realtors© and Mortgage Brokers associations point fingers at appraisal management companies for their use of incompetent appraisers who don’t understand the local markets, appraisers are complaining that banks are abdicating their regulatory requirements to obtain credible appraisals by forcing them to go through appraisal management companies at half of their normal fee.

Banking regulations allow banks to utilize the services of third party providers like appraisal management companies, but ultimately hold the bank accountable for the quality of the appraisal. Unfortunately, the banking regulators have yet to express a concern that there is a problem with the current situation.

I need to state that appraisal management companies can provide a valuable service to the lending industry by ordering appraisals, managing a panel of appraisers, performing quality reviews of the appraisals, etc. However, banks have been enticed by appraisal management companies to turn over their responsibility for ordering appraisals with arrangements that ultimately do not cost them anything.

The arrangement works like this, the bank collects a fee for the appraisal from the borrower; orders an appraisal from the appraisal management company who in turn assigns the appraisal to be done by an independent appraiser or appraisal company. During this process the appraisal fee paid by the borrower gets paid to the appraisal management company who retains approximately 40% to 50% and pays the appraiser the remainder. So for the $400 appraisal fee being charged to the borrower, the appraiser is actually being paid $160-$200 for the appraisal. Absent an appraisal management company the reasonable and customary fee for the appraisers service would be $400, not the $160 to $200 currently being paid to appraisers.

Rules within the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) have allowed this situation to occur, despite prohibitions against receiving unearned fees, kickbacks and the marking up of third party services, like appraisals. RESPA clearly states, “Payments in excess of the reasonable value of goods provided or services rendered are considered kickbacks”.

Banks are allowed to collect a loan origination fee. This fee is intended to cover the costs of the bank related to underwriting and approving a loan. Ordering and reviewing an appraisal is certainly a part of that process. Understanding that banks ultimately have the regulatory requirement to obtain the appraisal for their lending functions, why is it that borrowers and appraisers are paying for these services that are outsourced to appraisal management companies? Does the borrower benefit from a bank hiring an appraisal management company? Does an appraiser benefit from a bank hiring an appraisal management company? The answer to those two questions is a very resounding, no! Clearly the only one in the equation that benefits is the bank, so why shouldn’t the banks be required to pay for the outsourcing of the appraisal ordering and review process?

It is here where I believe the solution for the appraisal industry exists. Since banks are the obvious benefactor from the appraisal management company services, the regulators should require that the banks, not the borrowers or appraisers, pay for the services received. This one small change in the current business model would allow appraisers to receive a reasonable fee for their services and in turn they should be held more accountable for the quality and credibility of the appraisals they perform. Appraisal fees would be competitive among appraisers in their local markets, much like the professional fees charged by accountants, attorneys, dentists and doctors. Appraisal management companies would suddenly be thrust into a more competitive situation where their services can be itemized and their quality and price be compared to those of competing providers. This will ultimately lead to lower fees and improved quality of services to the banks. The banks will then have a very quantifiable choice, do they continue to outsource their obligations to an appraisal management company and pay for those services or do they create an internal structure to manage the appraisal ordering and review process? Either way, the banking regulators need to hold the banks more accountable at the end of the process.

When all of the previously discussed elements are present, I believe the appraisal industry will be functioning the way it was intended. Appraisal independence will be enhanced and borrowers will be rewarded with greater quality and reliability in the appraisal process. This is exactly the change that is needed, in addition to the HVCC, to stop the current finger pointing and address the poor quality and non-independent appraisals that have been and are still rampant in the industry.

Tags: Fannie Mae, Appraisal Management Companies, HVCC, AMC, NAR, National Association of Realtors, Freddie Mac

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Every quarter for more than a year, we have seen losses in the neighborhood of $10B – $20B for each of the former GSEs Fannie and Freddie. However, with the Stim and bailouts in the multi-trillion range, the current losses seem like chicken feed (no offense meant to hard working chickens).

My kids remind me often of the Austin Powers quote:

Why make trillions,
…when you can make…billions?

Modified version “why lose trillions, when you can lose billions?”

FHFA, the federal oversight agency that was created after the meltdown began (don’t get excited, it is essentially the former OFHEO and appears to be run per the same executives that were in charge of oversight before the meltdown) reported that both Fannie and Freddie are facing “critical” problems.

Ok, this is nothing new. We know these agencies will be losing money for many years until we undergo extensive de-leveraging.

What continues to be a concern for me is the ability of these agencies to attract talented people to steer them. Even though the GSEs are essentially federal agencies, they are dealing with enormous and complex problems. Their predecessors were highly compensated but, like everyone else, didn’t see it coming.

Images of the government issued gray painted rooms and bulky metal desks come to mind – ie, your local DMV. One could argue that the “talented” executives were the ones that got us in trouble. However, I think this is an over simplification and short sighted.

One hurdle to putting Fannie and Freddie back on firm financial footing is the many vacancies in their executive ranks. Hiring has been slowed by compensation concerns, the agency said.

That’s why salary caps in most company situations are probably short-sighted. Ben & Jerry’s took several years to find a CFO because of their 5x salary cap from lowest to highest paid employees kept away good talent.

Yes some Wall Streeters got crazy compensation packages, but do we get even with them and apply it to all executives connected with this financial morass that take Fed dollars or work in Fed agencies? Is this a case where the exception makes the rule?

How will “toxic mortgages” be sold off if the company purchasing them feels even a hint of salary cap talk, even retroactive salary caps? Senior executives are not likely to jump in the pool, if their bathing suit might be taken away without warning – ok, bad visual but hopefully you get my point.

Although when I renewed my driver’s license last year, it only took 10 minutes.

Tags: FHFA, Fannie Mae, GSE, OFHEO, Freddie Mac

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The future of condo new development sales activity across the US appears in serious trouble, yet it doesn’t have to be that way – and its all due to a new government agency, Fannie Mae.

Back in September 2008, when the wheels were coming off the economic wagon, the US Treasury bailed out the former GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and AIG). It was the end of an era where both enterprises served two masters: the US taxpayer (exposure to risk) and its shareholders (profits and share price), to simply serving the former.

The mandate of promoting home ownership at all costs (literally) by these institutions had run amok which is one of the reasons why we are in this mess. While the GSEs served a noble purchase of providing standardization and liquidity to the mortgage market to promote home ownership, somewhere along the way, the link between value and risk was lost because systemic risks were not clearly understood. To be fair, they were simply one part of a giant problem, yet a key part because Fannie Mae set the tone for the mortgage industry and that message was grow at all costs and lend by exception.

Now that Fannie Mae is effectively a government agency, it is getting reacquainted with the religion of risk, and it’s become a quick student by adopting policies that are prudent, but very damaging to the collateral they are trying to protect. It is of great concern because the rules are being changed in the middle of the game, making weak markets worse by stranding thousands of would be buyers and owners. Many new development projects are stalled or have had only a handful of sales since the September tipping point.

Effective March 1, Fannie Mae:

The government-backed mortgage-finance company stopped guaranteeing mortgages in condo buildings where fewer than 70% of the units have been sold, up from 51%. In addition, the company won’t back loans for sales in buildings where 15% of current owners are delinquent on association fees or where more than 10% of units are owned by a single-entity.

Prudent, yet devastating to the existing inventory of newly developed condos across the country – a robotic like ruling that may likely stop most sales activity in new developments if buyers can’t qualify for mortgages. This will simply damage the entire collateral classification (new development condo) and push many existing loans underwater.

Of all the new changes (which are not unreasonable if the housing market wasn’t in crisis) the increase from 51% to 70% pre-sale requirement for a mortgage to qualify for purchase by Fannie Mae makes it nearly impossible for buyers to qualify for a mortgage in a new development unless it is nearly sold out. All the projects that came online late in the cycle could be damaged by this hard core – its a catch-22 really. How does a project claw its way from say 20% sold to 70% sold? All cash lenders and those that ignore Fannie Mae are few.

The policy will result in a higher rate of foreclosures for entire developments as well as individual homeowners who no longer qualify.

In other words, if you helped make the mess, you need to help clean it up, not make it worse. And of course, get a bonus.

Tags: Fannie Mae, GSE, Freddie Mac

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The appraisal world changes on May 1, 2009.

I have been on a mission over the past year to creat awareness of the continuing issue of appraisal pressure and to prevent the enabling of appraisal management companies via the Cuomo/Fannie deal to dominate the mortgage appraisal business. It appears a foregone conclusion that appraisal management companies will dominate the mortgage appraisal process and as a result, will end up with a system worse off than before the credit crunch began.

Earlier this year, Mr. Cuomo threatened to sue government-sponsored mortgage investors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for allegedly failing to ensure that appraisers were shielded from pressure to inflate their estimates. Appraisers have long maintained that many loan officers or brokers, whose pay depends on how many loans they complete, pressure them to come up with value estimates high enough to ensure approval of the loans.

In March, Fannie and Freddie, eager to avoid a legal battle, agreed with Mr. Cuomo on an appraisal code of conduct. That plan drew fire from mortgage-industry groups and some federal regulators. Among other things, they said the code could raise costs for consumers and cause unnecessary disruption in the appraisal business.

One of the key issues facing appraisers was the pressure we were placed under to “hit the number” during the recent mortgage/housing boom. 20 years ago our clients were stodgy financial institutions with a separate appraisal departments surrounded by a firewall to keep loan officers away from the appraiser. Just before the onset of the credit crunch, the mortgage system originated something like 3/4 of its volume via mortgage brokers, who are paid when the loan closes. They select the appraiser {red flag} to perform the appraisal for the mortgage. If the appraiser comes in low, eventually, maybe not initially, the mortgage broker would find someone “better” {wink}. I can tell you, 75% of the appraisals completed for mortgage purposes are not worth the paper they are written on.

New York State Attorney General Cuomo opted to start with the appraiser and follow the mortgage. He ended up striking a deal with then GSEs Fannie and Freddie to curtail some past practices called Home Valuation Code of Conduct or HVCC. Some appraisers lovingly call the agreement “Havoc” because of the chaos it created. It enabled appraisal management companies.

One of the main changes was removing the ability of mortgage brokers to order mortgage appraisals directly if the mortgage was to be sold to Fannie and Freddie. If a mortgage application has an appraisal order through the mortgage broker, then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac won’t buy it from the bank. This is a significant incentive for a lender because many banks need to sell their loans rather than retain them in portfolio in order to recapitalize and lend more.

I thought this was a terrific idea because stopped this tainted relationship structure between the person setting values and the person being paid on a commission if the value was high enough. But with this solution, a problem was created and that new problem outweighs the former problem.

Because of the way the HVCC is being implemented, most lenders are effectively incentivized to order appraisals through appraisal management companies. The best way I can describe much of this cottage industry is

a centralized appraisal ordering and management organization run by 19 year old kids without any real estate experience who focus nearly exclusively on turn time and half market rate appraisal fees.

Kenneth Harney, of the nationally syndicated column, The Nation’s Housing in the Washington Post writes in his article: An Appraisal Upheaval

When you apply for a mortgage to buy or refinance a house, should you be concerned that your appraiser is being paid much less than the $300 to $600 you’re charged, perhaps half?

Should you know who pockets the rest, or that cut-rate fees are too low to attract the most experienced appraisers?

Should you care that the appraiser might be pushed to come up with a number so quickly — almost overnight in some cases — that he or she doesn’t have the time to do a proper inspection and accurate evaluation of comparable properties, pending sales contracts and local market trends?

Without realizing it, Cuomo has moved the problem from “values biased high” to “values unreliable”

But some prominent appraisers are scathing in their criticism of management firms. “Their quality is terrible — all they want you to do is crank it out at the lowest cost,” said Jonathan Miller, president and chief executive of Miller Samuel, one of the largest appraisal companies in the New York City area. Only “the least experienced people” are willing to do the work, he said, “and the product is unreliable.”

In recent issue of American Banker, Kate Berry wrote an article Re-Appraisal: How Revision is Recasting Expectations

“You’re creating a situation where a lender is going to have to order a lot of appraisals from an AMC,” said Jonathan Miller, the president and chief executive officer of the New York appraisal firm Miller Samuel Inc.

Mr. Miller said, “Appraisal-management companies are subject to the same pressure as mortgage brokers; only there’s actually more at stake. They’re almost more vulnerable” because most of the companies depend heavily on a few lender clients.

Do you remember the AMC known as eAppraise-it?

Cuomo sued them for all the reasons this agreement shouldn’t be implemented without modification.

Tags: Fannie Mae, Appraisal Management Companies, HVCC, GSE, AMC, Freddie Mac

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I have been particularly impressed with the way that the newly created Federal Housing Finance Agency has been keeping us informed on what they have been doing to help with the housing market since the credit crunch began in the summer of 2007.

Organized, neat, outspoken, timely. You only have to read the FHFA mission statement to understand what they are all about:

Promote a stable and liquid mortgage market, affordable housing and community investment through safety and soundness oversight of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks.

Sounds like a necessary regulatory agency to me.

The FHFA’s predecessor, Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) was also responsible for regulatory oversight during the Fannie Mae accounting scandal and the collapse of the GSEs leading to their bailout in September 2008, had a remarkably similar mission statement as FHFA’s.

OFHEO has an important and compelling mission

to promote housing and a strong national housing finance system by ensuring the safety and soundness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Before the global credit crunch and US housing market decline, where was the actual oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Today the new institution replacing the old one is run by the same person (whom I find to be quite well-spoken) and their new web site is nearly identical to the old one yet the mission has now expanded to include the Federal Home Loan Banks.

The implication of promoting liquidity in the revised mission statement isn’t a new concept since that was one of the primary reasons for the existence of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the first place. And OFHEO’s advocacy of affordable housing seemed to morph from low income housing to simply making housing finance costs cheaper.

Still, I have higher hopes for all federal regulators going forward now that they have been lulled from hibernation.

After all, there’s a bear out there.

Tags: FHFA, Fannie Mae, GSE, OFHEO, Bailout Nation, Freddie Mac

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In Kenneth Harney’s column this week “In Times Like This, Only the Freshest Comps Will Do” he discusses how lenders are requiring appraisers to use more recent comps in their appraisals.

Wow! Shocking!

• Can you believe that appraisers should be using comps that are more recent to reflect the current market?
• How will we “make the number” for the lender so the deal will work?
• What an incredible inconvenience to everyone involved in the transaction!

Last night I was the speaker at an event and a loan officer came up to me beforehand and said (I am paraphrasing):

“It’s a pain these days to get deals done, not like the old days. We have no access to the appraisers anymore. It’s crazy!”

How do you respond to this?..other than: Are you out of your &*%$#% mind? That’s the kind of thinking that got us in this mess. Good grief.

A “comp” or comparable is a piece of evidence that reflects market value of the subject property by comparing it to and making adjustments for differences. The older the “comp” relative to current value and the more adjustments that need to be made, the more diminished its relevance is to estimating market value.

Major lenders and investors such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are “beating down on the appraisal” by demanding 90-day comps or fresher

Lenders shouldn’t need to require more current comps to be used if the appraiser is on the ball, especially in a declining market area.

Here’s a classic example in Ken’s article:

“Some sellers are taking a beating,” he said, citing a recent transaction where the appraisal came in thousands of dollars below the signed contract price. Had the seller not agreed to eat the difference — take a lower price than the buyer had agreed to in the contract — “the whole deal could have fallen through”

Duh! That’s simply the process of finding the market. The seller was willing to take a lower number. Don’t lay it on the appraiser, who has to prove the market value to the lender empirically.

Here’s a problem though. In weaker real estate markets, there are fewer sales to select more recent comps from. Contracts are the guiding light even thought closed sales are required.

An appraiser colleague of mine told me this many years ago:

Everyone’s smarter than you. The buyer, the seller, the buyer’s real estate agent, the seller’s real estate agent, the mortgage broker, the lender, the buyer’s real estate attorney and the seller’s real estate attorney. They are all looking at you as the final step in the deal.

They already know the “number”.

Another problem, is the education of sellers on the value of their home.

The housing market may have gone bust, but many homeowners are still living in a bubble.

Despite dismal housing headlines and reports showing falling prices nationwide, owners in some once-hot areas still believe their home is gaining value or at least holding its own.

In other words, everyone else’s property values are weakening except their own.

It took John Cicero [no relation to my business partner in our firm Miller Cicero] and his wife an appraisal, some convincing by their real estate agent and some hard-to-swallow facts to get them to lower the $525,000 listing price on their five-bedroom home in Valrico, Fla. They closed two weeks ago for about $380,000.

“We didn’t really understand the severity of the market,” Cicero said. “We lost close to $100,000 in equity so we were walking away from real money.”

Ok, so this isn’t rocket science.

The value of a home isn’t in a vacuum (even though vacuums literally suck). The value of home is in relationship to others that would compete for the same buyer using the principle of substitution.

Tags: Fannie Mae, Miller Cicero, Freddie Mac

6 Comments

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced that the conforming loan limited for mortgages will remain at $417,000.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) today announced the conforming loan limit will remain $417,000 for 2009 for most areas in the U.S. but specified higher limits in certain cities and counties. The conforming loan limit is the maximum size of loans that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac can purchase in 2009.

According to provisions of the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA), the national loan limit is set based on changes in average home prices over the previous year, but cannot decline from year to year. Loan limits for two-, three-, and four-unit properties in 2009 will remain at 2008 levels as well: $533,850, $645,300, and $801,950 respectively, for homes in the continental U.S.

In theory, if housing markets continue to fall sharply in certain parts of the country, the implied mortgage risk will actually increase because the cap on the mortgage limit can not be reduced. Of course we are in the middle of a financial crisis caused by throwing risk out the window so it’s ironic that it’s actually against the best interests of the financial market to be more conservative in this regard. Probably because that’s not really the problem.

So we keep the loan limit the same again despite:

• declining market conditions
• change the name of the agency to FHFA from OFHEO (OFHEO was responsible for oversight of Fannie and Freddie before they needed to be bailed out)
• run by the same person as before who now suggests FHFA has plenty of ammunition (no offense intended to Mr. Lockhart).

From the contrarian department…

Yet here’s something new (hat tip to Holden Lewis of Mortgage Matters) that definitely doesn’t conform to longstanding rhetoric from someone who reported last year at this time about 5 months in a row that the problem with credit was temporary…

[NAR Chief Economist Lawrence] Yun says, without giving specifics, that the federal government should step in to stabilize house prices. That’s quite a plea, coming from a representative of an organization that’s usually all for hands-off government. There’s nothing like a severe recession to make free-marketers abandon their principles with alacrity.

And the contrarian-contrarian department…

Here’s an opinion that’s contrarian to those who claim to be contrarian: lowball offers in a weak real estate market don’t work according to accomplished real estate author, writer, agent, speaker Ali Rogers, well-known for her book “Diary of a Real Estate Rookie“

Some real estate gurus would argue that that’s okay, you should go ahead and make ridiculous offers, because if you’re willing to ask a gazillion people you’ll finally run down one exhausted one who will capitulate. Then, hey, it’s like you won the lottery.

One problem with that strategy: I don’t generally think it works.

Tags: Conforming Mortgage, FHFA, Fannie Mae, Lawrence Yun, OFHEO, Bankrate.com, NAR, National Association of Realtors, Freddie Mac

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