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President Donald Trump signed an executive order yesterday that establishes a White House Council tasked with identifying and removing barriers hindering the development of affordable housing, HousingWire.com reported. In effect, he is “tearing down red tape in order to build more affordable housing,” a White House release said. The council will comprise members of eight federal agencies and be chaired by Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson. Its creation will “streamline interagency processes and deliver results even faster,” the White House said. This will require the council to meet with state and local leaders to identify issues impeding the development of affordable housing, and to assess the impact of state, federal and local regulations on the cost of such development. Among the specific issues the council will aim to tackle include ways to cut excessive costs in order to spur construction.

Investor purchases of U.S. homes have climbed to an all-time high, a sign that rising home prices have done little to dampen demand for flipping homes or turning them into single-family rentals, the Wall Street Journal reported. Big private-equity firms, real-estate speculators and others that buy properties comprised more than 11 percent of U.S. home purchasers in 2018, according to data released yesterday by CoreLogic Inc. The investor purchases are the highest on record and nearly twice the levels before the 2008 housing crash. The investor interest poses a challenge for millennials and other first-time buyers who are increasingly looking to buy starter homes and are forced to compete with deep-pocketed cash buyers. Big commercial property owners like Blackstone Group LP and Starwood Capital Group began buying thousands of homes out of foreclosure during the housing bust. Many economists credit investors with helping to stabilize the housing market in 2011 and 2012 by buying with cash when prices were low and mortgage credit froze. But analysts expected those purchases to slow, as the market rebounded and properties could no longer be had for fire-sale prices. Instead, demand for properties has intensified. While these purchases dipped slightly when the market started to recover in 2015 and 2016, they have rebounded to surpass the previous peak of six years ago.

Ditech Holding Corp., which filed for bankruptcy in February, said on Tuesday that it reached two separate deals with buyers for its forward and reverse mortgage servicing and originations businesses, the Wall Street Journal reported. Publicly traded real-estate investment trust New Residential Investment Corp. will acquire assets of Ditech’s forward mortgage servicing and originations business Ditech Finance LLC, while Mortgage Assets Management LLC will buy the stock and assets of the company’s reverse mortgage business, Reverse Mortgage Solutions Inc. New Residential’s offer will be designated as a stalking-horse bid, and each of the two agreements are subject to higher and better offers. The deadline for submitting competing bids is July 8 and a confirmation hearing is scheduled for Aug. 7. The Fort Washington, Pa.-based company planned to sell its assets since the start of its chapter 11 proceeding, and the company has also negotiated a deal with lenders to forgive more than $800 million in debt.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency yesterday asked Congress for the authority to charter new government-sponsored enterprises to compete with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the first step in a move to overhaul the nation's housing finance system, Politico reported. The FHFA is seeking to end the market dominance of Fannie and Freddie, the two companies that were rescued by the government during the housing crisis and now guarantee about half the country's mortgages. The Treasury Department is expected to release a blueprint of its own plan as early as this month. Both FHFA Director Mark Calabria and the Trump administration have repeatedly said that they would like to work with Congress on housing finance reform but will move unilaterally if they have to. Some lawmakers are resisting sweeping changes in mortgage finance. Fannie and Freddie’s “duopoly undercuts competition in the market,” Calabria wrote to lawmakers in a letter presenting the agency’s 120-page annual report to Congress. “Increased competition would reduce market reliance on either enterprise and enhance market stability, as well as benefit home buyers,” he added. “To promote competition, Congress should authorize additional competitors and provide FHFA chartering authority similar to that of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.”

Mark Calabria has a message for Congress: Help the Trump administration overhaul mortgage-finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or he will do what he can on his own, the Wall Street Journal reported. The two companies, critical to half the nation’s mortgages, have been under government control since the 2008 financial crisis. For over a decade, policymakers have tried and failed to return them to the private sector and scale back the government’s role in housing. Calabria is expected to send ideas to Congress as early as this week. He acknowledged that mortgages could become more expensive if the Trump administration returns Fannie and Freddie to private hands without a broader legislative solution — a reason Congress ought to act, he said.

In a stealth aftershock of the Great Recession, nearly 100,000 loans that allowed senior citizens to tap into their home equity have failed, blindsiding elderly borrowers and their families and dragging down property values in their neighborhoods, USA Today reported. In many cases, the worst toll has fallen on those ill-equipped to shoulder it: urban African Americans, many of whom worked for most of their lives, then found themselves struggling in retirement. Alarming reports from federal investigators five years ago led the Department of Housing and Urban Development to initiate a series of changes to protect seniors. USA Today’s review of government foreclosure data found that a generation of families fell through the cracks and continue to suffer from reverse-mortgage loans written a decade ago. Those foreclosures wiped out hard-earned generational wealth built in the decades since the Fair Housing Act of 1968.