The announcement
FHFA Director Bill Pulte said on June 24, 2026, in a post on X, that Fannie Mae would expand its title-insurance waiver pilot for refinance loans, indicating announcements were coming from the company.
As of that date the statement was forward-looking. The actual terms of any expansion had not been published, and this article does not report that the expansion took effect.
What the pilot does
The programme allows approved lenders to use automated title review in place of a lender's title insurance policy or an attorney opinion letter on certain refinance loans with loan-to-value ratios below 80 percent, in specified geographies.
The distinction that gets lost in coverage is that this concerns the lender's policy, not the owner's policy. A lender's title policy protects the lender's lien position. On a refinance of a property the borrower already owns, the title chain has usually been examined at least once before, and the incremental risk of a defect arising since that examination is lower than on a purchase. That is the logic of restricting the waiver to low-LTV refinances.
The pilot originated in a March 2024 State of the Union proposal framed as part of a campaign against closing-cost fees. It was scuttled in 2023, revived in 2024, and continued with a new vendor added in 2025. United Wholesale Mortgage and Better joined in late 2024, and Rate announced its own test of waivers for enterprise-eligible loans shortly before Pulte's post. Rate has cited potential savings of up to $2,000 per closing. Fannie Mae plans to end the pilot test on November 30, 2027.
The industry response
First American released a study the same day warning about the risks of forgoing title insurance. Paul Hurst, the company's chief strategy officer, said insurers protect homeowners, lenders and taxpayers from substantial financial risk.
Analysts at KBW took a different view of the commercial stakes, telling HousingWire that the pilot remains very small and applies only to refinances, which account for under 10 percent of title insurers' revenues, so an expansion would not be meaningful to title insurance earnings.
Reading the two claims together
Analysis: the industry's defence and the analysts' assessment are not in conflict, and the gap between them is instructive. The financial exposure to title insurers is small; the precedent is not. If automated review proves adequate on low-risk refinances, the argument for extending it will be made on higher-risk files next, and that is the outcome the industry is contesting.
The unresolved question is who bears a loss when automated review misses a defect. A title policy transfers that risk to an insurer with reserves. A waiver leaves it somewhere — with the enterprise, the lender, or ultimately the borrower — and the public descriptions of the pilot reviewed here do not specify which.