February 2020 Industry Speakers

Hamilton Fout is Fannie Mae’s Vice President of Economic & Strategic Research, reporting to the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist. Fout is responsible for providing the forecasts of loan volumes and profiles to various business units of Fannie Mae. Fout is an important source of information regarding regional housing risks, the transmission of macro developments through the mortgage market, stress testing, and issues related to mortgage risks and cash flows.

Prior to joining the Economic & Strategic Research group, Fout worked in the Underwriting and Pricing division of Fannie Mae focusing on issues related to credit risk. In this role, he had primary responsibility for tracking and reporting on regional risks within Fannie Mae’s credit portfolio, developing property-level and loan-level risk models, and monitoring and evaluating portfolio-level risks and opportunities for the company’s Single-Family book of business.

Prior to joining Fannie Mae, Fout worked as an assistant professor at Kansas State University, where he taught econometrics and undergraduate and graduate-level macro courses. He remains an adjunct member of the faculty.

Fout’s recently published research focused on mortgage performance, severity, and collateral valuation.
Fout received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of North Carolina and a B.S. in economics and business from Florida State University.

Rebecca Rockey is an economist and is the Global Head of Forecasting at Cushman & Wakefield. In her role, she studies how economies, demographics, financial markets and commercial real estate interact—both at the macro and micro level. She analyses and produces forecasts for the U.S. macroeconomy and national property markets. She also manages the production of metro-level commercial real estate forecasts for various property types across the Americas, develops predictive econometric and statistical models to enhance the firms’ analytical capabilities and contributes to numerous white papers, webinars, media requests and presentations. In her new global role, she will extend this expertise to other regions. She was part of the forecast team that won the National Association of Business Economists Outlook Award in 2014.
She previously worked as a consultant at a finance/economics consulting firm in the Washington, D.C. area, principally engineering models to forecast loss reserves for a national housing finance company’s single-family private-label MBS portfolio. Prior to that, she was a junior economist at the Congressional Budget Office in the Financial Analysis Division (FAD). There, she contributed to numerous analyses related to federal credit programs, accounting treatments of federal credit, and the treatment of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the federal budget. She was particularly focused on fair value estimation of federal direct lending and guarantee credit programs and contributed to FAD’s first comprehensive estimate—across more than 100 credit programs with a portfolio value of $3.1 trillion—for the Congress.

John Hunt is the Principal of MarketNsight and President of ViaSearch. An industry leader for decades, John uses cutting edge technology to help builders, developers, lenders and real estate professionals make the right decisions for their companies and home buyers alike. With his fingers on the pulse of the industry, he has been able to consistently predict downturns, upswings and trends ahead of the curve. John was part of the team predicting the last housing recession years before it happened. He is now on the leading edge of Millennial and Active Adult buying trends. With expertise in markets across the Southeast and beyond, John is a highly sought-after speaker on the economy and real estate and is regularly quoted and published in national publications and news outlets.