The CRE Finance Council has filed a comment letter with the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) to opine on reforms of the nation's housing finance system. The Council focused its comments on one of its core competencies, the multifamily housing market. In the comment letter, and with respect to multifamily housing finance policy, the CRE Finance Council said the government should be focused on providing a stable, counter-cyclical, and affordable source of capital for affordable, and market-rate rental multifamily housing, while effectively managing the risk to the taxpayer and without bias toward or against homeownership.
Furthermore, the Council emphasized that housing finance policy should also recognize that the multifamily sector of the market is separate and distinct from the single-family sector in terms of risk profile, historic profitability, credit losses and stakeholders.
With respect to the housing finance system, the CRE Finance Council said it believes that some form of continuing governmental support for multifamily housing finance is necessary since eliminating support would have a significant adverse effect on the economy both at the macro and micro level. The comment letter also emphasizes that the key elements of reform should involve maintaining the public-private ownership model for current or future government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) involved in multifamily housing finance.
This year, the CRE Finance Council established a Multifamily Housing Forum and a Government-Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) Reform Task Force to focus on issues related to the multifamily housing finance reform. The CRE Finance Council's GSE Reform Task Force is made up of a cross-section of members who work in and have an intimate knowledge of the secondary mortgage market as it relates multifamily mortgages, commercial mortgage-backed securities, and multifamily housing.
Click here to view the CRE Finance Council comment letter.
For more information, visit www.crefc.org.
