How can mortgage lenders best navigate the fine line between reducing the risk of lending to highly leveraged borrowers and making homeownership available to more people? Over the decades, the pendulum has swung between tight lending standards that are safer (but more restrictive) and looser standards intended to help first-time homebuyers, lower income borrowers, or those with student loan debt.
There wasn’t a lot of investor activity in December, as you might expect, given the holidays. The states were likewise fairly quiet last month. But our compliance team was quite busy.
In this post, you’ll find links to some of the work our experts were engaged in last month to keep our clients up to date and fully compliant. We bring you all the news in this month’s compliance update.
For the past three years, Docutech has been your one-stop-resource for tracking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s new uniform residential loan application (URLA) for mortgage originators. While most of the changes have been released publicly since late 2018, lenders have been waiting on a new timeline for implementation.
November was a relatively quiet month on the rules side, with only a couple of states making any changes of note. However, Fannie Mae is previewing its plans for early 2020, and between URLA and new ARM products, we expect to see several significant new regulations in the first quarter of the year. November was busy on the document update side, however.
While automating the mortgage experience for consumers is a top priority in the industry, true success in adopting eMortgages includes creating the tools to support electronic workflows post-closing as well. These tools must not only ensure security and privacy, but make it easy to store, transfer and access closed eNotes.
To provide a more secure eVault experience for interim funders like warehouse lenders and secured parties like the Federal Home Loan Banks, MERSCORP Holdings, Inc., the parent company of Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (MERS), has launched the MERS eRegistry Secured Party and Secured Party Delegatee fields. These new Rightsholder fields enable those parties to better identify their security interests in electronic promissory notes.
Rising Home Ownership
The Hispanic population in the U.S. has been growing steadily and is predicted to continue driving homeownership gains in America for the foreseeable future. According to the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP), Hispanics are experiencing gains in three key areas, and this is resulting in higher levels of homeownership.
MBA’s annual convention is the largest and most content-packed mortgage industry conferences of the year. This year’s event in Austin, Texas, was no exception.
For those of you who may have missed the conference, key themes were eClosing and the increasing the acceptance of eNotes, economic trends and secondary market issues.
October saw several national and state rules and revisions announced, many of which go into effect in early 2020. In addition to an update to Regulation Z, Fannie Mae continued to provide minor updates to the URLA. However, lenders still do not have a timeframe for implementing the new applications and forms. In addition, California confirmed the details of its privacy law, which goes into effect in January. This law could impact some loan documents, so see below for additional details.
Earlier this week, Docutech announced an integration with NotaryCam that will enable borrowers to execute a complete RON eClosing ceremony in Docutech’s Solex eClosing platform by remotely connecting to the other parties (the eNotary, the closing agent, an attorney, etc.) via NotaryCam’s virtual audio/video connections.
We sat down with Rick Triola, Founder and CEO of NotaryCam, to spotlight their mission in creating a more widely accepted and regulated RON process, the future of the industry and the benefits of adopting a RON solution.
