Fannie Mae Changes

There are a few more changes that could impact borrowers that have recently applied for mortgage financing. In the underwriting release notes mentioned in the last post I found a huge change. FNMA no longer counts trailing spouse anticipated income. This could be a very big problem for the thousands of relocation homebuyers next year.

Another change, Fannie now requires IRS Form 4506-T instead of the Form 4506. My company has been doing this for a long time. Both forms allow the lender to receive a transcript of tax returns from the IRS for documenting the borrower’s income. The difference is the 4506 is for the previous year and the 4506-T is for the previous two years. In the past, these forms were used after a loan closed and only for a fraction of the transactions. Today we order them on every loan and the transcript must be received prior to closing! This is a really big change and it is expensive. Each transcript cost $50 and thankfully can not be passed on to the borrower. It costs us an additional $100 to process every loan even if they do not close.