Realtor Mag
The mortgage-financing environment for households could improve as a result of a rule federal regulators put in place Tuesday. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is the first of six financial regulators to release the final version of the long-awaited qualified residential mortgage (QRM) rule, which stems from the big 2010 banking reform bill the federal government enacted after the financial crisis.
The QRM rule provides a set of requirements a loan must meet to be considered safe and eligible to be sold to investors as part of a mortgage-backed security without the lender having to retain 5 percent of the loan amount on its books. Because the QRM loan comes without the risk-retention requirement, lenders should be able to make more loans — and for cheaper — because they don’t have to pass along that risk-retention cost to borrowers.
The National Association of REALTORS® has been vocal for several years about the QRM rule, saying it should be broad rather than prescriptive and that it should match up with the qualified mortgage (QM) rule, which took effect at the beginning of this year. The QRM rule does, in fact, do that. The QM rule provides ability-to-repay standards for safe and affordable loans, whether or not they’re securitized for sale to investors.
