Fannie Mae will ease financial standards for mortgage applicants next month

By Kenneth R. Harney, June 6, 2017

The top reason mortgage applicants nationwide get rejected is because they’re carrying too much debt relative to their monthly incomes. Fannie Mae will be raising its DTI ceiling from the current 45 percent to 50 percent as of July 29.

It’s the No. 1 reason that mortgage applicants nationwide get rejected: They’re carrying too much debt relative to their monthly incomes. It’s especially a deal-killer for millennials early in their careers who have to stretch every month to pay the rent and other bills.

But here’s some good news: The country’s largest source of mortgage money, Fannie Mae, soon plans to ease its debt-to-income (DTI) requirements, potentially opening the door to home-purchase mortgages for large numbers of new buyers. Fannie will be raising its DTI ceiling from the current 45 percent to 50 percent as of July 29.

DTI is essentially a ratio that compares your gross monthly income with your monthly payment on all debt accounts — credit cards, auto loans, student loans, etc., plus the projected payments on the new mortgage you are seeking. If you’ve got $7,000 in household monthly income and $3,000 in monthly debt payments, your DTI is 43 percent. If you’ve got the same income but $4,000 in debt payments, your DTI is 57 percent.

In the mortgage arena, the lower your DTI ratio, the better. The federal “qualified mortgage” rule sets the safe maximum at 43 percent, though Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration all have exemptions allowing them to buy or insure loans with higher ratios.

Studies by the Federal Reserve and FICO, the credit-scoring company, have documented that high DTIs doom more mortgage applications — and are viewed more critically by lenders — than any other factor. And for good reason: If you are loaded down with monthly debts, you’re at a higher statistical risk of falling behind on your mortgage payments.

Using data spanning nearly a decade and a half, Fannie’s researchers analyzed borrowers with DTIs in the 45 percent to 50 percent range and found that a significant number of them actually have good credit and are not prone to default.

“We feel very comfortable” with the increased DTI ceiling, Steve Holden, Fannie’s vice president of single family analytics, told me in an interview. “What we’re seeing is that a lot of borrowers have other factors” in their credit profiles that reduce the risks associated with slightly higher DTIs. They make significant down payments, for example, or they’ve got reserves of 12 months or more set aside to handle a financial emergency without missing a mortgage payment. As a result, analysts concluded that there’s some room to treat these applicants differently than before.

Lenders are welcoming the change. “It’s a big deal,” says Joe Petrowsky, owner of Right Trac Financial Group in the Hartford, Conn., area. “There are so many clients that end up above the 45 percent debt ratio threshold” who get rejected, he said. Now they’ve got a shot.

That doesn’t mean everybody with a DTI higher than 45 percent is going to get approved under the new policy. As an applicant, you’ll still need to be vetted by Fannie’s automated underwriting system, which examines the totality of your application, including the down payment, your income, credit scores, loan-to-value ratio and a slew of other indexes. The system weighs the good and the not-so-good in your application, and then decides whether you meet the company’s standards.

Fannie’s change may be most important to home buyers whose DTIs now limit them to just one option in the marketplace: an FHA loan. FHA traditionally has been generous when it comes to debt burdens: It allows DTIs well in excess of 50 percent for some borrowers.

But FHA has a major drawback, in Petrowsky’s view. It requires most borrowers to keep paying mortgage insurance premiums for the life of the loan — long after any real risk of financial loss to FHA has disappeared. Fannie Mae, on the other hand, uses private mortgage insurance on its low-down-payment loans, the premiums on which are canceled automatically when the principal balance drops to 78 percent of the original property value. Freddie Mac, another major player in the market, also uses private mortgage insurance and sometimes will accept loan applications with DTIs above 45 percent.

The big downside with both Fannie and Freddie: Their credit-score requirements tend to be more restrictive than FHA’s. So if you have a FICO score in the mid-600s and high debt burdens, FHA may still be your main mortgage option, even with Fannie’s new, friendlier approach on DTI.

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- Daniel Barli, Esq.

http://www.barlilaw.com 

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More new mortgages are risky ones

March 12, 2017 - Paul Davidson , USA TODAY

Riskier borrowers are making up a growing share of new mortgages, pushing up delinquencies modestly and raising concerns about an eventual spike in defaults that could slow or derail the housing recovery.

The trend is centered around home loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration that typically require down payments of just 3% to 5% and are often snapped up by first-time buyers. The FHA-backed loans are increasingly being offered by non-bank lenders with more lenient credit standards than banks.

The landscape is nothing like it was in the mid-2000s when subprime mortgages were approved without verification of buyers' income or assets, setting off a housing bubble and then a crash. And Quicken Loans, one of the largest FHA lenders, dismisses the concerns as overwrought. Still, for some analysts, the latest development is at least faintly reminiscent of the run-up to that crisis.
“We have a situation where home prices are high relative to average hourly earnings and we’re pushing 5%-down mortgages, and that’s a bad idea,” says Hans Nordby, chief economist of real estate research firm CoStar.

The share of FHA mortgage payments that were 30 to 59 days past due averaged 2.19% in the fourth quarter, up from about 2.07% the previous quarter and 2.13% a year earlier, according to research firm CoreLogic and FHA. That’s still down from 3.77% in early 2009 but it represents a noticeable uptick.

While that could simply represent monthly volatility, “the risk is that the performance will continue to deteriorate and then you get foreclosures that put downward pressure on home prices,” says Sam Khater, CoreLogic’s deputy chief economist. Such a scenario likely would take a few years to play out.

The early signs of some minor turbulence in the mortgage market add to concerns generated by recent increases in delinquent subprime auto loans, personal loans and credit card debt as lenders target lower-income borrowers to grow revenue in the latter stages of the recovery.

FHA mortgages generally are granted to low- and moderate-income households who can’t afford a typical downpayment of about 20%. In exchange for shelling out as little as 3%, FHA buyers pay an upfront insurance premium equal to 1.75% of the loan and 0.85% annually.

Some economists are concerned about the growth of riskier home loans for first-time buyers (Photo: Kevin P. Casey, for USA TODAY)

FHA loans made up 22% of all mortgages for single-family home purchases in fiscal 2016, up from 17.8% in fiscal 2014 but below the 34.5% peak in 2010, FHA figures show.

The share has climbed largely because of a reduction in the insurance premium and home price appreciation that has made larger downpayments less feasible for some, says Matthew Mish, executive director of global credit strategy for UBS. House prices have been increasing about 5% a year since 2014.

At the same time, the nation’s biggest banks, burned by the housing crisis and resulting regulatory scrutiny, largely have pulled out of the FHA market as the costs and risks to serve it grew. Non-bank lenders, which face less regulation from government agencies such as the FDIC, have filled the void.
Non-banks, including Quicken Loans and Freedom Mortgage, comprised 93% of FHA loan volume last year, up from 40% in 2009, according to Inside Mortgage Finance. Meanwhile, the average credit score of an FHA borrower fell to 678 in the fourth quarter from 693 in 2013, according to FHA, below the 747 average for non-FHA borrowers. Mish says non-banks generally have looser credit requirements, and lenders have further eased standards – such as the size of a monthly mortgage payment relative to income – as median U.S. wages stagnated even as home values marched higher.

Here’s the worry: If home prices peak and then dip, homeowners who put down just 5% and are less creditworthy than their predecessors will owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. That would increase their incentive to default, especially if they have to move for a job or face an extraordinary medical or other expense, Khater says.  Foreclosures would trigger price declines that ignite more defaults in a downward spiral.

In turn, funding for the non-bank lenders from banks and hedge funds likely would dry up, and FHA loans would be harder to get, dampening the housing market and the broader economy, Mish says.
Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, says such fears are unfounded, noting Federal Reserve officials have complained that FHA loan standards have been too rigorous.

“The non-banks are bringing a welcome change,” he says. They still must meet FHA standards, he says, and are regulated by agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Bill Emerson, vice chairman of Quicken Loans, the largest non-bank lender, says the credit standards of his firm and his peers are actually stringent by historical standards and appear looser only because banks sharply tightened their requirements after the housing crash.

“I don’t have any concerns about” a potential increase in delinquencies or defaults, Emerson said in an interview. “In the last three, four years, consumers have more access to credit….and all of a sudden it’s, ‘Here we go again.’ Likening the mid-2000’s meltdown to a 100-year flood, he added, “I don’t believe we’re anywhere close.”


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Daniel Barli, Esq.

http://www.barlilaw.com

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