Who is Fannie Mae?
Created by Congress in 1938, Fannie Mae is the nation’s largest source of financing for home mortgages. A private, shareholder-owned company that works to make sure mortgage money is available for people to purchase homes. Fannie Mae describes it’s goal as “helping more families achieve the American dream of homeownership.”
Fannie Mae, as the largest underwriter and purchaser of mortgage loans, has set the standards within the mortgage industry for conventional lending. If you are purchasing a new house, no matter what lender you get financing through, the criteria you must meet in order to qualify for the loan has been established by Fannie Mae. Exceptions are niche market loans that are not eligible for re-sale to Fannie Mae.
Lenders and brokers access Fannie Mae’s underwriting guidelines via their web-based “Desktop Originator”. With the ability to submit a loan application directly into Fannie Mae’s automated underwriting, the time in which it takes a loan to be processed and closed has shorten considerably. Getting a mortgage used to take months, now it can be done in just a few weeks.
We [Fannie Mae] are in the American Dream business. Our mission is to tear down barriers, lower costs, and increase the opportunities for homeownership and affordable rental housing for all Americans. Because having a safe place to call home strengthens families, communities, and our nation as a whole.
Since 1938, we have helped put more than 66 million families into homes of their own, and as long as more Americans continue to dream of a safe place to call home, we’ll keep working with our partners to make it a reality.
More Americans own homes today than at any other time in history. Fannie Mae is working to expand homeownership opportunities by joining with lenders and community partners to create products and technologies to reach underserved communities, so that more people can own their own homes.