Housing Finance Working Paper Series

Send this to a friend FULL TEXT: Adobe Acrobat (*.pdf) Executable (*.exe)

This paper examines the mortgages purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two major Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) in the conventional secondary mortgage market. The analyses focus on detailed borrower, locational, and loan characteristics of such mortgages in the 1996-97 period. In general, the report is based on the loan-level data that the GSEs submit annually to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The paper finds that the GSEs generally increased their performance on the goals established by HUD in 1995 and that they surpassed all of their 1996-97 goals, with Fannie Mae's performance exceeding Freddie Mac's performance on each of the goals in both years.