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In this episode of On the Hill, Tim Rood, Head of Industry Relations, talks with Craig Phillips, a Wall Street veteran and the top housing advisor to former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. For the first time, Phillips takes us behind the scenes in the Trump administration and talks frankly about why efforts to move Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of conservatorship failed.

In a post-pandemic world, business leaders are radically rethinking their approach to hiring and managing talent. The COVID-19 crisis has emphasized the need to respond nimbly to chaotic change, manage fixed costs, accelerate productivity and innovate more quickly. Many firms are looking to reposition, seeking critical skill sets and experience to help them evolve, innovate and stay agile amid rising disruption and volatility.

Consumer protection regulations in the mortgage lending process have grown exponentially since the Great Recession. U.S. lenders must comply with federal mandates, regulations from 50 different states and nearly 200 different license types utilized by non-banks. Every step of the mortgage lending process requires specific disclosures, creating significant regulatory compliance risks. Fortunately, technology is quickly evolving to address the challenge.

Key metro areas in the U.S. are rebounding quickly from the COVID-19 pandemic, although some market shifts from the last year persist, according to SitusAMC Insights Top 5 Bottom 5 Metro ranking for Q1 2021. This proprietary quantitative and qualitative analysis ranks the top investment opportunities for each of the major property types from a relative value vs. price perspective, using the weighted average of NPI-NCREIF total returns across commercial real estate sectors (apartment, industrial, retail, office).

Following the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, many of the nation’s largest banks began gravitating away from mortgage origination, concerned about higher risks, lower profits, and a changing regulatory environment. Over the last decade, independent mortgage banks (IMBs) or so-called “nonbanks” have filled the gap. Warehouse lenders extend short-term lines of credit to IMBs, secured by real estate collateral, allowing nonbanks to fund loans in their names rather than as a broker. IMBs originate and quickly sell the loans into the secondary market and pay the lender back.