Two Fannie Mae Multifamily Execs to Depart

Two of Fannie Mae Multifamily’s top brass, Rob Levin and Dan Dresser, are on their way 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 upcoming 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.

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 in part 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.

Both played crucial roles in overseeing the multifamily arm for a number of years, though Fannie denies the exits as part of any investigation. The agency is now reckoning with some of Fannie’s ineffective policies meant to fend off borrower fraud.

“Both leaders are leaving the company in good standing,” Fannie Mae said in a statement to The Real Deal. “These changes were part of our normal leadership review and succession planning process, and not related to external factors.”

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 them were unsuccessful.

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.”

The story has been updated to clarify details about the $752 million credit loss as well as include a statement from Fannie Mae and more information about their upcoming departure.