Sagent’s Matt Tully on housing regulation

In this interview, Sagent’s Vice President of Agency Affairs and Chief Compliance Officer Matt Tully discusses how a Biden administration will likely impact housing regulation and what the overall change in government administration means for banks and other lenders when it comes to housing.

Here is a small preview of the interview with Tully — be sure to watch the full discussion above. The transcript below has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Q: I want to get started by discussing the recent Presidential election as we’re now 43 days away from Inauguration Day. There are still many concerns pertaining to housing regulation under a new administration. One area of focus is the CFPB. Though we’re unsure about the future leadership at the CFPB, how strong of a role is CFPB likely to play under a Biden administration?

Matt Tully: I think it will absolutely take a very strong role. If you think back to 2008, during the housing crisis, we had a major election, a turnover of control in the White House, and the economy was a mess. People were reeling and wondering what was going to happen in the new administration. There was no CFPB and there was no Dodd-Frank. What’s different about this time is that the financial crisis we’re currently in is driven by a pandemic, rather than housing, as it has actually been a strong spot. This means we’re not necessarily having to recreate the housing regulation system. We have Dodd-Frank in place, new mortgage servicing and origination rules. Additionally, the CFPB has been around for some time, originators and servicers have been used to working under CFPB under two different administrations with different flavors. So, where I think you’ll probably see the biggest change is around enforcement generally. And some rules will probably be revisited as well. I would expect, for instance, the FDCPA rule that the CFPB just published may end up being revisited, and perhaps there will be some questions around the qualified mortgage rule. Overall, I think in general, what we’ve seen in talking to our clients over the last couple of years, is that the CFPB hasn’t gone away. They’re still getting examined and they’re still getting questions. It’s probably just the frequency and the pressure around those examinations that will increase relative to what they’ve experienced over the last four years.