Nature is full of trivia. The moon moves about two inches away from the Earth each year. The Earth gets 100 tons heavier every day due to falling space dust. The climate, obviously, is part of nature. Climate, and natural disasters, impact our clients, people, insurance premiums, and the value of servicing in areas prone to hurricanes, flooding, forest fires, and earthquakes. A certain portion of those events (the number is increasing) are determined by FEMA to be natural disasters, and last year 3.4 million adults in the U.S. were at one point or another forced to evacuate their homes due to one, according to the Census Bureau. Approximately 1.4 percent of the American adult population. That’s a lot higher than historical averages, up to 800,000 on average for the years between 2008 and 2021. 12 percent were people displaced for over six months and 16 percent were adults who never returned home. The Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Research Institute for Housing Amer
“Where can you always find money? In the dictionary.” Plenty of lenders and finding the money to buy other companies while smaller ones are looking for the right buyer. Eat or be eaten seems to be the name of the game as lenders hungry for production are courting other lenders. Some just get out of the game entirely. (See lender and investor section below.) Cutting costs and being efficient continue to be of paramount importance regardless of plans for the future. Is the credit process cost effective and efficient? Yesterday I mentioned changes in the credit world and received, “Rob, when will companies learn that there are ‘too many snouts in the credit trough’? There’s Fair Isaac, the Bureaus, and the credit resellers. It is not a level playing field, and now, like the old days of having different gfees for different lenders, lenders are slotted into ‘tiers’. In the next few years, we’ll be moving from a tri-merge environ
Does technology always trump personal skills? Sometimes. But not all the time. Good LOs use the technology that best suits them in combination with their personal attributes to help borrowers every day. “In space, no one can hear you scream. In cyberspace, no one can shut you up.” How ‘bout some IT-related stuff? Here’s a softball: did you know that “Bluetooth” was named after Harald Bluetooth? The Bluetooth wireless specification design was named after the king in 1997, based on an analogy that the technology would unite devices the way Harald Bluetooth united the tribes of Denmark into a single kingdom. Another good use of technology is exhibited by Tim Lucas who writes, “There are more than 5 million Native Americans in the U.S. but only about 140 approved lenders. I created a Section 184 calculator that shows the required down payment, MI costs, and more. There's also a flowchart and a ton of info about the program.” T
Have you ever heard the term “scuddle”? It’s an English term from the 1500’s meaning “to wash dishes,” something many of us did plenty of over Christmas. I bring this up because on this date in 1886 Josephine Garis Cochrane patented the world’s first dishwasher! Where would we be without women in schools or the workplace or being educated… Or thinking? (Let’s ask the Taliban in Afghanistan: hopefully you’re following this nightmare.) The United States is nowhere near that, but we have a gender pay gap that has remained relatively stable over the past 15 years or so. In 2020, women earned 84 percent of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers. Common explanations of this disparity, present across most industries and professions, include the perception that women are less likely than men to negotiate raises and promotions, women’s