“In the early days, very little impact,” Walters said in a telephone interview from Detroit. “But the longer it goes on, the more impact there’ll be.”

Kris Wilson, senior loan officer at Fairway Independent Mortgage, said the Madison, Wisconsin-based lender is planning to delay until after closing the requirement for a tax transcript in most cases. Other lenders may be more reluctant.

“It is a risk,” Wilson said. “But we are unwilling to disappoint customers in that way.”

Loans that conform to guidelines set by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac won’t be affected directly by the shutdown, because the government-controlled mortgage aggregators fund operations through fees collected from private lenders, not taxpayers, according to Stan Humphries, Zillow Inc.’s chief economist.

New Loans

The two mortgage finance companies are responsible for the majority of new loans while the FHA and U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs account for about one in four new mortgages. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which offers low-down payment mortgages to rural borrowers, has canceled loan closings during the shutdown, according to its website.

A short-term disruption of some FHA loans “while certainly detrimental, shouldn’t have much long-term impact on either demand or housing affordability,” Humphries said in a Sept. 30 blog post.

Only 67 of the FHA’s 2,972 workers are working through the shutdown, including 29 employees dealing with loan endorsements and preservation of properties, said Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman Jerry Brown. FHA is an arm of HUD.

During the shutdown, FHA won’t process “Title 1” manufactured housing and home-improvement loans and reverse mortgages, which allow borrowers age 62 or older to withdraw equity and repay it only when their homes are sold, according to the latest update to HUD’s contingency plan.

“There’s a skeleton crew,” he said in a telephone interview. “We still intend on processing FHA loans.”