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Fannie Mae has agreed to backstop up to $1 billion in debt from the country’s largest owner of single-family rental homes, the first time the government-sponsored entity has agreed to guarantee the debt of an institutional owner of single-family houses, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Blackstone Group LP’s Invitation Homes Inc. disclosed its agreement with Fannie on Monday in a filing detailing the company’s finances ahead of its planned initial public offering. After the foreclosure crisis, the New York investment firm spent roughly $10 billion buying and fixing up houses to rent through Invitation Homes. Fannie Mae’s involvement is a sign that it believes homeownership will remain out of reach for many Americans and that Wall Street’s housing wager will be become a long-term business, not just an opportunistic trade made after the foreclosure crisis. The support represents a shift from about four years ago, when Fannie’s regulator blocked another government-sponsored entity from backing bulk buyers of foreclosed homes. Fannie’s support will likely make it cheaper for buyers like Blackstone to add homes in the future.

Soon after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, his administration undid one of Barack Obama’s last-minute economic-policy actions: a mortgage-fee cut under a government program that’s popular with first-time home buyers and low-income borrowers, Bloomberg News reported. The new administration on Friday said that it’s canceling a reduction in the Federal Housing Administration’s annual fee for most borrowers. The cut would have reduced the annual premium for someone borrowing $200,000 by $500 in the first year. Last week, Obama’s Housing and Urban Development secretary, Julian Castro, said that the FHA would cut its fees. The administration didn’t consult Trump’s team before the announcement. Republicans have argued in the past that reductions put taxpayers at risk by lowering the funds the FHA has to deal with mortgage defaults.

The U.S. consumer financial watchdog said yesterday that it had fined subsidiaries of Citigroup Inc. $28.8 million for giving "the runaround to borrowers" on mortgage servicing by keeping them in the dark about options to avoid foreclosure or making it difficult for them to apply for relief, Reuters reported. CitiMortgage will pay an estimated $17 million to compensate wronged consumers, as well as a civil penalty of $3 million, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said. CitiFinancial Services will refund approximately $4.4 million to consumers, and pay a civil penalty of $4.4 million. The CFPB said that the subsidiaries neither admitted nor denied the findings in the consent orders.

Societe Generale agreed to pay a $50 million civil fine and admit to misconduct to settle U.S. claims that it fraudulently concealed from investors the poor quality of residential mortgage-backed securities it marketed and sold, Reuters reported on Friday. The U.S. Department of Justice said on Friday that the French bank concealed problems in a $780 million debt issue it arranged in 2006, and which has since left investors with "significant losses" that may grow further. The debt issue, SG Mortgage Securities Trust 2006-OPT2, was backed by subprime loans from Option One Mortgage Corp, then a unit of tax preparer H&R Block Inc. Societe Generale admitted to concealing how many of the loans were not underwritten properly and should not have been securitized, and that no borrowers owed more on their loans than their homes were worth.