Over the last few days we’ve been hearing about a new 2% fee being imposed on Fannie/Freddie mortgages.  It looks like it’ll depend on the lender - this came from a wholesale mortgage banker describing the situation:

I understand that Freddie/Fannie will only allow 10% of portfolios to include high balance loans.  If they exceed more than 10% then Freddie/Fannie will impose this fee.  Thus, GMAC was really aggressive for a while with the high balance and now more aggressive with regular conforming.
 
Each lender is different and depends what they have going on with the portfolios they are currently trying to sell to Fannie and Freddie.  This fee may be around for a while as many high balance loans have been registered and/or locked.
 
Thus, you can explain to your borrowers that it is a function of the secondary market and at this time the marketplace is saturated with high balance loans at this time.  So much fun.

“High-balance” loans are the super-conforming mortgages – those between $417,000 and $546,250 in San Diego County.  

The lenders that have more than 10% of the super-conforming loans in their portfolio being sold to Fannie/Freddie have to charge an extra 2 points on any additional super-conforming mortgages.  This will cause lenders to very carefully monitor how many super-conforming loans they generate.

Not only will this temper the availability of super-conforming loans, it’s going to drive borrowers away from banks and to mortgage brokers who can shop around to find the lenders who have openings.