Weekly Real Estate News
Summary
Fannie Mae will update single-family MBS disclosures beginning Oct. 19 to add Fannie Score, Freddie Score and a Pricing Indicator identifying whether Classic FICO or VantageScore 4.0 was used to price a loan, giving investors more visibility into the credit models behind newly issued securities.
Fannie Mae is adding a new layer of credit-score information to its single-family mortgage-backed securities disclosures, giving investors more visibility into the models used to assess and price loans as the housing-finance system moves deeper into a multi-score environment.
Beginning Oct. 19, Fannie Mae said its PoolTalk disclosures and related issuance and monthly loan-level and security files will add the Fannie Score, Freddie Score and a Pricing Indicator for October 2026-issued securities. Weighted-average fields for the Fannie Score, Freddie Score and credit-score models used in pricing will also be added.
The change is part of the broader credit-score modernization effort and is being aligned with Freddie Mac disclosure practices.
Investors will be able to see which score priced the loan
The Pricing Indicator is particularly important because it identifies whether Classic FICO or VantageScore 4.0 was used to price a loan. Fannie Mae said that when a lender orders both models, the additional score will also be disclosed.
The Fannie Score is different. It is generated from credit-repository data and used by Desktop Underwriter during its credit-risk assessment of a casefile submission, but Fannie Mae explicitly said the Fannie Score is not used to price the loan.
That distinction matters as lenders, investors and mortgage technology providers adapt systems built around a long-standing credit-score framework. The new disclosure fields create a clearer trail between the score information available on a loan and the model that actually influenced pricing.
Fannie Mae said Fannie Scores outside the 400-to-950 range, or cases where a score is not provided, will be reported as Not Available. Loans in securities issued before October 2026 will show the Fannie Score as Not Applicable, and no credit-score-model values will be disclosed for securities issued before May 1996.
There are also limitations for reperforming loans. Fannie Mae said the Fannie Score will be reported as unavailable for reinstated loans and will not be populated for modified fixed-rate and modified step-rate loans.
Why the disclosure change matters
The operational impact reaches beyond securities investors. Mortgage lenders, analytics firms, data vendors and secondary-market teams that consume Fannie Mae files will need to accommodate the new attributes and updated file layouts.
Fannie Mae said October 2026 securities issued before the Oct. 19 implementation date will be updated that day to include the new attributes. Excess Servicing Fee disclosure files will not receive the new fields at this time.
The disclosure overhaul does not itself change borrower eligibility or announce a new credit-score approval. Instead, it changes what investors can see in the securities data as multiple credit-score models become part of mortgage production and pricing.
For the secondary market, that added transparency will matter increasingly as analysts begin comparing loan performance, pricing and prepayment behavior across loans evaluated under different score frameworks.
