The Manufactured Housing Institute (MHI) held an information-providing webinar on Thursday concerning its top legislative priority in the coming year, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The law is considered the most comprehensive rewrite of rules governing banking and financial services in decades and is expected to impact every aspect of consumer finance activity in the nation. The Act provides an unprecedented level of authority to a new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (CFPB) to develop and rewrite rules and regulations governing mortgage lending activity, including manufactured home loans secured by personal property. The over-reaching concern is that the bill creates new requirements that will make already scarce financing even harder to obtain for manufactured home buyers. The webinar revealed there are more than 200 technical inconsistencies in the bill. Of particular concern to the manufactured housing industry are competing definitions of a mortgage originator in the SAFE Act and the Consumer Protection Act. MHI is currently working on legislation that would address this and other concerns. “It’s a complex bill, it’s a thousand-plus page document alone and there are multiple ways to address our issues,” says MHI Vice President of Government Affairs Jason Boehlert (listen to the audio clip below). A number of documents including a talking-point fact sheet relating to the call have been posted at MHMSM.com as follows:
