Mortgage Reports and Studies

GAO Releases Report on HMDA Data and Fair Lending

On August 12, the Government Accountability Office released a report, Fair Lending: Data Limitations and the Fragmented U.S. Regulatory Structure Challenge Federal Oversight and Enforcement Efforts. The report analyzes the current fair lending laws and their enforcement, as well as identifies limitations in the consistency and effectiveness of fair lending oversight, particularly examining data limitations under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. Click here to view the report.

First Monthly Report Issued On Making Home Affordable Program

More than 400,000 mortgage-loan modification offers have been extended and more than 230,000 trial modifications have begun under the Making Home Affordable Program, according to the Treasury Department's first monthly report on the program released August 4th.  The modification pace puts the program on track to offer assistance to up to 3 to 4 million homeowners over the next three years, Treasury officials said.

These figures were released under the Obama Administration first monthly Servicer Performance Report, detailing the progress to date of the Making Home Affordable (MHA) loan modification program.  The data show, however, that servicer performance has been "uneven," and the administration has asked servicers to ramp up trial modifications to a total of 500,000 by Nov. 1, they said. This would more than double in three months the number of trial modifications started in the program's first five months. The report discloses each participating servicer's performance under the program.  Click here to access reports .

ABA Releases Real Estate Lending Survey

The increasing regulatory burden, growing compliance costs, and ambiguity over rules still in the pipeline left real estate lending conditions mostly unchanged from the previous year, according to the ABA's 19th annual Real Estate lending Survey.   The information on the survey was compiled from responses from 185 ABA members active in real estate lending.  Respondents include savings banks, commercial banks, and both mutual and stock-owned institutions.  Roughly 86% of participating institutions had assets of less than $1billion.  The Survey was initially unveiled in March 2012 at the Annual ABA Real Estate Conference in Boston.  In addition to finding broad conditions mostly unchanged in 2011, the survey found that  refinancings made up 63 percent of mortgage activity in 2011, down slightly from 66 percent in 2010 but unchanged from 2009.  Fixed rate mortgages remained the preferred loan structure representing 80 percent of originations in 2011, down from 81 percent in 2010.  The 30 year fixed rate structure was the most popular, comprising 47 percent of all mortgages originated, 1 percentage point down from 2010.  Click here to access the survey.

MARI Report Finds Fraud Against Lenders Increased 42 Percent

On Tuesday, December 2, the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, LLC (MARI) released its Quarterly Fraud Report, (see link below) indicating that incidents of mortgage fraud perpetrated against lenders increased by 45 percent in the second quarter of 2008 from the same quarter last year.  The report cites that Florida, California, and Illinois had the highest rate of incidents of reported fraud.  Florida saw a five percent increase in general application misrepresentation in the second quarter, while California saw a 20 percent decrease.  Illinois had the highest percentages of income and employment misrepresentation on the loan application.  Click here to view the report.

Questions? Please contact Rod Alba, (202) 663-5592 for more information.