Thursday’s Advocacy & Think Tank Round-Up

The National Association of Realtors (NAR)’s Existing Home Sales (EHS) (completed transactions). EHS fell 10.5% from October and 3.8% from last November. NAR believes this precipitous decline is not due to any decrease in demand but, rather, tight inventory and the Industry’s having to adjust to new “Know Before You Owe” mortgage disclosure rules.
Seeking Alpha blog’s about the evolving receivership of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Tuesday’s Regulatory & Legislative Round-Up

Congress has finally passed the much awaited Tax extender’s legislation, H.R 2029 The Consolidated Appropriations Act, included is a win for affordable housing advocates – the nine percent minimum Low Income Housing Tax Credit was made permanent.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has proposed a Duty to Serve Underserved Markets Rule, required by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008, which requires Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (GSEs) to serve three underserved markets: Manufactured Housing, Affordable Housing Preservation and Rural Housing. The GSEs would be required to establish and implement plans to serve each market and would receive duty to serve credits for success. The proposal is open for comment until March 17, 2016.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) announced that it plans to expand the Neighborhood Stabilization Initiative into 18 additional Metropolitan areas -the program gives community organizations an “advanced first look” opportunity to purchase foreclosed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac properties, before they are offered to the general public. This interactive map provides more detail about the 18 Metropolitan areas targeted by the program.
FHFA has also released it’s Annual Housing Report for the 2014 activities of Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac – in 2014 they acquired $584 billion of loans on single-family owner-occupied housing and provided funding for 738,466 multifamily rental units in 2014.
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) releases it’s 50th Anniversary Commemorative Book, in which NYU’s Furman Center Contributes a chapter, Race, Poverty & Federal Rental Housing Policy discussing the key goals of the agency, evaluating its progress and identifying “key tensions running through its work.” In another Chapter, Housing Finance in Retrospective authors Wachter & Acolin trace the impact of HUD on the U.S. market.

The U.S. Census Bureau/HUD has released the New Residential Construction Statistics which show new building permits down slightly since August but 4.5% higher than Sept. 2014. Housing completions are up both month over month and year to year.
The New York Federal Reserve has released a paper: The Rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and a related blog post: Evaluating the Rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in which the authors evaluate the now seven years and running government conservatorship which injected $187.5 billion into the two entities. The authors conclude that the short term intervention was necessary “because of the central role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the U.S. mortgage market, and the GSEs’ interconnections with the rest of the global financial system.” They go on to argue that the conservatorship was meant to be a temporary “time out” and characterize the lack of mortgage finance reform a “striking failure” and cite broad consensus that the GSEs should be replaced with a private system.

The FHFA releases it 2015-2017 Housing Goals for Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac.
The US Department of Agriculture released its 20^th Annual Food Security Report. The reports shows that 1 in 7 people live in food insecure households, but there has been a slight decline over the past few years.