Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac today announced the release of the redesigned Uniform Residential Loan Application, the first substantial revision to the form in more than two decades. Changes include a reorganized layout, simplified technology and new data fields, including mobile phone number, email address and military service history. Lenders may begin using the form on January 1, 2018.
Among the new fields are several elements required under recent Home Mortgage Disclosure Act rule changes. For lenders who continue to use the former URLA starting in 2018, the GSEs issued a separate demographic addendum to capture the expanded HMDA data.
As previously reported by ABA Daily Newsbytes, American Bankers Association advocacy prompted the Federal Housing Finance Agency to drop a proposed question from the URLA that asks borrowers to indicate their language preference. ABA had previously raised concerns that including a language preference question would create a reasonable expectation that the customer would receive communication in their desired language, and could leave lenders open to UDAAP liability if they did not proceed in the specified language. For more information, contact ABA’s Joe Pigg.
