The Federal Housing Administration has implemented new policy changes designed to curb the losses the agency has suffered as a result of bad loans. As part of its new policy announced Jan. 20, the FHA’s overseer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, will conduct reviews every three months of FHA loans originated over the preceding two years.
This could spell trouble for many of the FHA’s worst performing lenders, particularly for builder-run lenders.
According to a story in the Feb. 1 issue of American Banker, several builder-run lenders (owners or businesses that finance their own projects) rank among the 10 worst-performing lenders of the 50 highest-volume FHA originators. As the American Banker piece noted, part of the problem may be that being an in-house lender at a company whose main business is selling houses makes for loose underwriting.
With HUD turning a watchful eye to the performance and previous activities of FHA lenders, builder-run lenders with poor performance records may find themselves terminated from the FHA list of lenders or, worse in many cases, be forced to indemnify HUD for loan losses.
Under the new policy, HUD could terminate any lender whose default and claim rate was more than triple that of its region, if it also exceeded the national rate. According to American Banker, two builder-affiliated lenders already met that criteria and would have been in serious danger of being terminated — were it not for the fact that they had already ceased their loan departments. In Las Vegas, Centex's CTX Mortgage ran a 27 percent default rate in the two-year period, more than triple that of its peers. And in Los Angeles, loans by D.R. Horton's DHI Mortgage Co. have produced a 19 percent default rate, yielding an off-the-charts compare ratio of 572 percent, according to American Banker.