Washington, D.C – March 18, 2025 – Days after the confirmation of Bill Pulte as Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), The Community Home Lenders of America (CHLA) sent a comprehensive letter to Director Pulte, laying out CHLA’s priorities for protecting small IMB mortgage lenders and the GSE affordable housing mission.
The four key recommendations in the CHLA letter are:
1. Fannie and Freddie should maintain their affordable housing footprint, including condo, investor, and second home loans – without volume caps or fee increases unrelated to risk.
2. Fannie and Freddie should strictly adhere to PSPA cash window requirements – and should not arbitrarily reduce the number of seller-servicers, out of convenience or to cut costs.
3. Fannie and Freddie should complete the process of replacing repurchase demands for performing loans with loan defects with an indemnification fee based on Enterprise risk.
4. Fannie and Freddie should take actions to cut mortgage origination costs – e.g., rejecting bi-merge in favor of tri-merge and addressing FICO’s monopolistic credit score price hikes.
The CHLA letter began by expressing appreciation for the first Trump Administration’s actions to create a permanent equitable cash window requirement and supporting the Administration’s interest in moving forward on a Fannie and Freddie exit from conservatorship.
A major focus of the CHLA letter was on Fannie and Freddie maintaining their commitment to their affordable housing mission – identifying reasons why they should not shrink their housing footprint, including addressing investor loans and second homes, which were the subject of restrictions in 2020.
The CHLA letter closed by promising in the near future to separately weigh in on small lender priorities as part of a potential Fannie/Freddie exit from conservatorship.
About Community Home Lenders of America
Community Home Lenders of America (CHLA) is the only national non-profit association that exclusively focuses on small and mid-sized community-based mortgage lenders. The mission of the CHLA is to promote federal mortgage programs, rules, and regulations which treat community mortgage lenders fairly, and which reflect the critical importance that community mortgage lenders play in providing broad access to credit for borrowers, in increasing competition in mortgage markets, and in providing borrowers with quality mortgage services and access to loans at a local level. Learn more: https://www.communitylender.org/ or by following the organization’s LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/community-home-lenders-association-inc/.