In the secondary markets, lenders are trying to wring out every penny from loan sales. For example, in today’s podcast (available here) is an interview with Senior Director of MCT’s Investor Services team, Jennifer Kennelly, on MCT’s Bid Auction Manager (BAM) Marketplace, the nation’s first open mortgage loan exchange. In the primary markets, it’s rough, and I received this note from a senior executive. “In our branches, this is worse than the meltdown. In 2008-2010 we may have had problems finding lenders to loan money, but there were some, and we still had business. And rates were okay. Today we barely have any business and rates are so high borrowers become angry at us when we quote them!” And the cost of doing business is continuing to escalate. “NCRA understands that the end users of the tri-merge mortgage credit report (the mortgage lenders) have been grouped into three pricing tiers by Fair Isaac (FICO) with a wholesale price increase of less than 10% for the top tier of approximately 46 lenders, about 200% for approximately six lenders in the middle tier, and more than 400% for all other mortgage lenders in the nation. This is a paradigm shift in the pricing structure for credit scores and is being dictated to the mortgage credit reporting industry from all three national credit bureaus and/or FICO.” (Today’s podcast is available here and this week’s is sponsored by Candor Technology: Home of the One Touch Underwrite, supporting lenders from Point of Sale to Post Close QC, to reduce repurchase risk, increase underwriter productivity by 400 percent, and decrease turn-times by 10.)