The Federal Housing Finance Agency will develop and finalize its plan to build a securitization platform by Dec. 31.
The plan, announced in February, is intended to repair the nation’s mortgage finance space by creating a secondary market that serves both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as a post-conservatorship market with multiple future issuers. The platform will also be expected to support the emergence of a private mortgage securitization market.
The FHFA announced the year-end deadline Friday in a conservatorship scorecard that provides an implementation roadmap for the agency’s broader strategic plan to reduce GSE dominance in the housing market.
According to the FHFA, the two GSEs currently provide $5.7 trillion in mortgage finance to the housing industry.
The scorecard comes just days after the FHFA Office of Inspector General released an analysis concluding that the FHFA and Freddie Mac did not implement stronger oversight of mortgage servicers when they had the chance.
The objectives and timetables set in the scorecard push the GSEs to: Continue progress on, or even complete, mortgage market enhancement activities already under way; contract their dominant presence in the marketplace while shrinking certain operations; and maintain foreclosure prevention activities and credit availability for new and refinanced mortgages.
In February, FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco sent a plan to Congress that builds a completely new infrastructure for the secondary market while contracting activities at Fannie and Freddie.
“The absence of any meaningful secondary mortgage market mechanisms beyond the enterprises and Ginnie Mae is a dilemma for policymakers expecting to replace the (GSEs),” DeMarco said in a letter to Congress. “Without an alternative market infrastructure that investors could rely on, new mortgages would have been largely unavailable if the Enterprises suddenly had been shut down.”
