This week the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued its Rural and Underserved Areas Tool linked here https://www.consumerfinance.gov/rural-or-underserved-tool/. The tool is designed to assist creditors in determining if properties are located in a rural or underserved area and eligible for certain exemptions from various requirements provided to certain small creditors under the CFPB’s mortgage rules.
The Rural and Underserved Areas Tool is a the result of a final rule approved by the CFPB on September 21, 2015 and published in the Federal Register on October 2, 2015 which revises the CFPB’s regulatory definitions of small creditor, and rural and underserved areas. Creditors using the tool are provided a safe harbor determination that a specific property securing a mortgage loan is located in a rural or underserved area.
The CFPB’s Rural and Underserved Areas Tool allows look-up of one to ten addresses through a manual search and up to 250 properties through batch look-up, based on the year in which the loan was made. The results will be displayed on a web page after the processing completes, or within a few minutes of the request for batch look-up, and can be viewed online, printed or downloaded as a PDF and/or Comma Separated Values (CSV) file.
The CFPB has provided an informative Q&A in conjunction with the tool that addresses how to use the tool, how to upload data and how to interpret the results.
You can find a summary of the Small Creditors and Rural or Underserved Areas final rule outlined in an article we published on September 25, 2015, linked here. https://mycomplianceresource.com/new-regulation-z-rules-for-small-lenders-and-rural-and-underserved-areas/.
Published by Robin Cooper.
