Two of Fannie Mae Multifamily’s top brass, Rob Levin and Dan Dresser, are out at the mortgage giant, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Levin was head of multifamily customer engagement, and Dresser was the vice president of multifamily capital markets and pricing. Dresser had been at the agency since 2006, while Levin joined Fannie Mae in 1998.
The departures, announced in an email, come amid a leadership change at Fannie Mae’s multifamily arm. The agency appointed Kelly Follain, the former head of PGIM’s head of agency lending, as the head of its multifamily division earlier this year.
Under the new head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency Bill Pulte, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have undergone a major shakeup. Three days after he was sworn in, Pulte appointed himself chairman of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and removed 14 board members at the agencies.
Fannie Mae declined to comment.
Dresser and Levin’s sudden exits occur at a challenging period for Fannie Mae’s multifamily segment. The agency, which buys loans from private lenders and securitizes them to sell to investors, set aside a $752 million credit loss because of fraud or suspected fraud at the end of 2024.
The actual amount of fraud Fannie Mae is exposed to is likely far higher than $752 million.
According to an internal Fannie Mae email in March 2024 obtained by The Real Deal, the agency warned that its exposure to just eight sponsors partaking in fraud surpassed $700 million. Those sponsors are now on the agency’s blacklist.
The scheme worked thus: Owners on the blacklist bought properties, deferred maintenance and ran the buildings into the ground, according to an internal email. When things got bad, the investors would flip property to a related party or inflate the financials.
The blacklisted investors managed companies with at least 1,235 Chicago-area apartment units, according to a TRD analysis.
It is unknown what led to Levin and Dresser’s exits. Both played crucial roles in overseeing the multifamily arm for a number of years. The agency is now reckoning with some of Fannie’s ineffective policies meant to fend off borrower fraud.
Dresser led a team overseeing services related to the pricing and trading of Fannie Mae’s mortgage-backed products. Levin led all of Fannie Mae’s multifamily production activities, including its Delegated Underwriting and Servicing lending platform and borrower relationships.
Both are still listed on Fannie Mae’s website, but attempts to reach their work emails bounced back.
Pulte says he is making a concerted push to weed out mortgage fraud. He recently fired 100 employees at Fannie Mae for alleged “unethical conduct.”
On Monday, Pulte tweeted, “There is no room for fraud in our mortgage markets. None. We will continue to root out frauds and cheats wherever we find it. No one and no company is above the law – no one.”
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