With financing for both residential and commercial real estate mortgages still tight, and the securitization market all but stagnant by historical standards, policymakers have been pushing lenders to get the wheels of finance churning again. It's a fine line to walk with new regulatory compliance issues and constrained capital, but Rep. Scott Garrett thinks he has the answer - covered bonds. They represent a $3 trillion market and are a major source of mortgage liquidity among European nations.
Home prices in extremely overvalued U.S. metropolitan areas declined nearly 37 percent on average between 2005 and the fourth quarter 2009, according to IHS Global Insight. At the peak of the bubble, nearly half of the metros in IHS' study were considered "overvalued." Now, not a single market can make that claim. In fact, nationally, the company says housing is 8.9 percent undervalued. And new data from Altos Research suggests that prices in many of the hardest-hit markets are still on a slippery downward slope.
In two separate reports released this week, Fannie Mae took a look at the past and made predictions for the future. On Thursday, the government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) released "Helping Housing Recover: A Report on Fannie Mae's Mission Performance," describing the company's efforts to provide liquidity, stability, and affordability to the nation's housing finance system. On Wednesay, the GSE released its March 2010 Economic Outlook, cutting its mortgage origination predictions for this year.
Nationwide, one in every 200 residential loans funded last year, totaling $14 billion, involved fraud, according to First American CoreLogic. Despite what looks like an unsettling amount of shadiness lurking within the mortgage market, the company says the fraud rate has been steadily declining for the past three years and is now about 25 percent lower than when it peaked in the third quarter of 2007.
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