The debate rages on among the mortgage lending professionals and their respective trade groups. Should FHA again reduce their required mortgage insurance premiums? If so, should they reduce the upfront premium, the annual renewals, or maybe both? (FHA Cut). Proponents of the additional rate cuts say that the prior actions to reduce the annual premiums helped make FHA loans much…
Maybe there is a little “happy” in this New Year. The latest housing market indicators all seem to be pointing in the right direction. Although all the planets are not quite fully aligned, the outlook for housing is more positive than negative (Housing Market). The National Association of Realtors reported that sales of existing homes rose almost 15% from November…
Financing options for mixed-use properties have greatly expanded thanks to a change in a long-standing FHA rule limiting FHA Section 203(b) mortgage insurance to properties that have non-residential portions exceeding 25% of the total floor area. Up until September 14, 2015, a prospective borrower was able to utilize FHA Section 203(b) financing to purchase a mixed-use property under certain conditions.…
President Obama gave his last State of the Union address on last evening, 1/12/2015. Unfortunately, for those of us in the housing and mortgage lending industry he did not address or even mention anything about a housing policy targeted to help more Americans realize their dream of homeownership (Speech). A dream that has been dealt a severe blow resulting from…
The results are in and the report is that the FHA insurance fund has made a fantastic comeback raising its capital requirement ratio to 2.07%. This is just north of the required reserves of 2%. Hats off to the FHA! Nice work. So, where do we go from here? The recent surge in the reserves was mainly due to two…
It is nice, for a change, to get some good news about the housing and related markets. Here’s some. According to HUD Secretary, Julian Castro, the health of the FHA insurance fund has significantly improved over last year (FHA Fund). This is believed to partly be the result of the previous 50 basis point reduction in the annual mortgage insurance…
