Remember this from September?

The use of third parties to help Fannie Mae sell its REO properties is coming to an end.

Fannie Mae notified remaining vendors that the government-sponsored enterprise will transition all REO sales work completely to Fannie Mae’s in-house teams over the course of the next several months.

In the past, Fannie Mae used in-house sales teams and external vendors to dispose of REO properties.

“We have reduced our REO inventory from 162,489 properties at the start of 2011 to 109,266 as of June 30, 2012,” said an email from Fannie Mae to HousingWire. “With a reduced inventory of properties, Fannie Mae’s in-house teams now have sufficient capacity to manage our REO properties without the assistance of third party asset management providers.”

Fannie Mae said the third party vendors, firms such as Vendor Resource Management and 24 Asset Management were notified of the move with enough time to make any necessary adjustments.

Some aspects of REO sales will remain the same.

“We will continue to engage local real estate professionals to market our properties,” Fannie Mae said. “Fannie Mae’s goal is to help neighborhoods recover by selling as many properties as possible to owner occupants at competitive prices.”

They deliberately brought the REO operation in-house because of “reduced inventory”.  But now it’s revealed that in the same month, September, 2012, they had 8x that number which were 90 days late?

Keeping their current staff busy with a limited supply of REOs allows the defaulters to skate longer – how can Fannie keep processing the defaulters if they scaled back their REO operation?

This smells bad.

Letting deadbeats skate for months and years erodes what is left of the moral fiber of this country.