Mortgages

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On July 24, 2020, the CFPB announced the issuance of consent orders against Sovereign Lending Group, Inc. (Sovereign) and Prime Choice Funding, Inc. (Prime Choice). The CFPB indicated in their announcement that these consent orders originated from a number of investigations by the CFPB into companies allegedly using deceptive direct mail campaigns to advertise VA…

On July 15, 2020, the CPFB filed a complaint in federal court against Townstone Financial, Inc. (Townstone) representing the first ever redlining complaint against a non-bank mortgage lender. The complaint is brought under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) and Consumer Financial Protection Act (CFPA), but not the Fair Housing Act (FHA). (The U.S. Department…

On July 16, 2020, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued an updated 2020 Complaint Bulletin and again focused on complaints related to COVID-19.

The Complaint Bulletin reflects 2020 consumer complaint data through June 15, 2020, and focuses on complaints filed through May 31, 2020 that mention COVID-19 keywords. Of the 187,547 complaints received in…

As previously reported, the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act (Growth Act), also known as S.2155, directs the CFPB to implement an exemption from the mandatory escrow account requirement for higher-priced mortgage loans (HPMLs) under the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) and Regulation Z for certain insured credit unions and insured depository…

The CFPB recently proposed a temporary extension of the qualified mortgage (QM) that is based on a loan being eligible for sale to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (often referred to as the “GSE Patch”). The CFPB also proposed to replace the strict 43% debt-to-income (DTI) ratio basis for the general QM with an approach…

On June 23, 2020, the CFPB published a new interpretive rule (the “Interpretive Rule”) to update the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data fields that are used to identify “underserved” areas. Certain provisions of Regulation Z, that apply to creditors doing business in “rural or underserved” areas, look to the HMDA-based identification of “underserved” areas…

On June 9, 2020, the CFPB published four new TRID FAQ’s and a TRID Factsheet (“Factsheet”). While the Factsheet is focused solely on the handling of title insurance disclosures under the rule, the FAQ’s cover various topics, including the separation of data when using separate Closing Disclosures for the consumer and the seller, the Total…

The CFPB has proposed amendments to Regulation Z to address the discontinuation of the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) that is currently used by many creditors as the index for calculating the interest rate on credit cards and other variable-rate consumer credit products.  In 2017, the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority, the regulator that oversees…