U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced on Thursday that the Obama administration is still hard at work on an extensive financial plan to overhaul Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-sponsored entities that have received more than $151 billion in taxpayer funds since the market downturn in 2008.

Just three weeks after word leaked that the Treasury Department, in conjunction with the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), would be launching an REO conversion program to sell its 250,000 distressed properties to investors as rentals, the FHFA has already begun pre-qualifying rounds for investors.
Under the new plan, participating investors may pre-qualify to establish their eligibility to bid on transactions in both the pilot phase of the program and all subsequent phases.

CoreLogic yesterday released its Home Price Index (HPI) for December, a survey of not only the pricing data for December but of the entire 2011 home value landscape.
Including distressed sales, the HPI reports a 4.7 percent decline in prices in 2011 compared to 2010, marking the fifth straight year that values have ended the year on the downside. As with past HPIs, though, distressed properties were a big part of those declines; when excluding distressed sales, home values were down just 0.9 percent in 2011.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has dramatically reduced the projected costs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to taxpayers in its latest estimations.
According to a HousingWire piece on the latest CBO Budget and Economic Outlook report, taxpayers can expect to spend another $27 billion between 2013 and 2022 shoring up the two GSEs, a $35 billion decrease from the CBO’s original projection of $62 billion.

The Obama White House yesterday offered details of its mortgage refinancing plan, an initiative first announced during the president’s State of the Union Address, claiming it could save homeowners an average of $3,000 a year.

Construction spending in the U.S. finished 2011 in a strong way, with December’s $816.4 billion annual rate the highest for spending in four months, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
A 1.5 percent increase from November, December’s totals were also 4.3 percent above December 2010. In the private sector, spending was 2.1 percent above November, increasing from $518.8 billion to $529.7 billion.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) received 2,300 mortgage complaints in the month of December, and 38 percent of them pertained to loan modifications and foreclosures; and according to recent reports, those complaints do not go unanswered.
The CFPB has received in total almost 10,000 complaints since opening its hotline in July, on issues as diverse as payday loans, student loans, credit cards and other financial products, and the agency has stated that implicated companies responded to 88 percent of complaints, and nearly 50 percent received relief of some kind.

Home values continued their downward slide with Tuesday’s Case-Shiller Home Price Index, the survey of home values by Standard & Poor’s that is considered the definitive voice on home prices. With a monthly decline of 1.3 percent and a yearly fall of 3.7 percent, the index was a reminder of the still-tender nature of home values.

The Qualified Residential Mortgage (QRM) provision in the Dodd-Frank bill is unquestionably the most controversial aspect of the legislation’s housing-related rulings, and since the start of 2012, eyes have been fixed on the fledgling Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency charged with defining the standards and parameters of a qualified mortgage.

The Census Bureau released its latest numbers on housing vacancies yesterday for the fourth quarter, and the results were in-tune with the more recent trends in housing – a 9.4 percent vacancy rate for rentals and a 2.3 percent for housing, both 0.4 percentage points lower than 2010′s fourth quarter.
The area of dispute, though, rests with the homeownership rate, with the Bureau placed at 66.0 percent, a decline of 0.5 percentage points from 2010′s fourth quarter and a 0.3 percentage point drop from the third quarter of 2011.