McDonald’s taking 9 years to eliminate its self-serve soda pop machines. (Couldn’t they take 5 hours and just move the machines behind the counter?) In other non-mortgage news, arguably more interesting to talk about than the continued decline in mortgage applications and IMBs concerned about CRA requirements (STRATMOR’s current blog is titled, “Knowing CRA Developments is Critical”), remember when it was Ford, GM, and Chrysler? The third largest automaker in the world is VinFast, a Vietnamese electric vehicle manufacturer that was founded in 2017 and listed on the Nasdaq this month with a market cap of $191 billion! This is behind only Tesla ($760 billion) and Toyota ($270 billion), and well ahead of Chinese car maker BYD ($90 billion) and Volkswagen ($70 billion). VinFast, which entered the electric vehicle market last year, is planning to build a factory in North Carolina. Oh, and Ford is at $49 billion, GM $46 billion. Yes, rankings of all industr
What color of front door “sells” the best? Some say black, although in a related topic red is the most popular. Doesn’t that mean red sells the best if there are more red front doors? Statistics are interesting things. LOs everywhere tell me that the deals are harder, and as an indication of both statistics and harder deals, a report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) revealed that 11 percent of Americans have a "thin or stale" score file, and therefore it's impossible to generate a current, valid credit score for them. Another 11 percent are considered to be "credit invisible," meaning that they don't have a credit file with any of the three major credit bureaus. That's a total of 22 percent of the adult population of the United States, around 50 million, that doesn't have a credit score at all. As an investor or a lender, and one of these adults wants to buy a home, even with meag
Sorry the commentary is a little late this morning. I received an email from my IT department that I needed to change my username and password. It took me a few minutes to remember that I didn’t have an IT department. Beware of those phishing expeditions! Technology… if it weren’t for my pets or grandparents, I don’t know what I’d do for passwords. There are obviously pluses from technology, of course, and thank you to Steve Richman who told me about Canva, a marketing website that appears darned easy to use. How about the darker side of tech, even including today’s “joke” about how card shuffling machines can be influenced and hacked into. (Do you really think virtual Wonder Woman slot machines are random?) Thank you to those who passed along this story about the aftermath of a cyberattack on a Southern California data host for property listing information, Rapattoni Corporation, freezing up real estate transactions and valuation
“Once things were so tough for me, I worked at a cheap pizza shop to get by. I kneaded the dough.” Things are indeed tough out there. The other day I caught my cat Myrtle at the keyboard, apparently trying to show my new granddaughter Kozette how to apply for a loan to buy a tuna fishing boat. (I know, there’s a lot going on here.) Anyway, up on the screen was a website that will generate a paystub given whatever information you provide. How’d you like to be an underwriter, trying to assure that the borrower has the ability to repay, with this out there? Hence the need, obviously, for some kind of third-party verification service, right? Meanwhile, companies, large and small, continue to sell servicing rights in packages, large and small, in order to raise cash. Servicing is, pretty much, all a lender has in terms of net worth. And when their servicing is gone, well…? For a good bell weather of the general industry, yesterday we had loanDepot'
“If they raise the interest rates one more time, you're going to hear Janet Yellen.” Much of the talk in the hallways here at the California Association of Mortgage Professionals event near San Francisco revolves around the Federal Reserve likely raising short term rates on July 26th due to the need to raise interest rates further to bring down inflation that is still too high. But the end to its current monetary policy tightening cycle is close. Compliance may be the new focus. “Tawny Johnson gave me the best mortgage I’ve ever had!” We’ve all seen reviews like that and wondered about them. Anyone who repeats reviews should know that the FTC announced its Endorsement Guides, which provide guidance to businesses to ensure that advertising using reviews or endorsements is truthful and complies with the FTC Act, have been revised. In other Federal Trade Commission news, it has opened an investigation into ChatGPT, released by Open AI whic