Yes, it’s already Tuesday. Are we at the top of the market? A pair of Goldman Sachs-backed ventures gobbled up an entire rental home community in Florida last month for $45 million, according to reports. Lenders everywhere keep one eye on housing trends, and every Friday at 3PM ET I do a Zoom show with Rich Swerbinsky for The Mortgage Collaborative discussing current events in finance and housing. I try to have fun backgrounds. In Friday’s show, however, at the 6-minute mark the wild horse in the hills above Reno decided he was done with the filming. And then there was the lunging horned toad at 32:30; fortunately, I outweighed it. Speaking of weak segues, “Demand continues to outweigh supply, with the number of potential buyers currently 61% higher than the five-year average. Meanwhile, the level of homes for sale is 37% lower than normal. But the number of properties being put up for sale is beginning to increase. The number of new listings in the four weeks to 2
“A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.” Lenders sometimes grapple with the former, always deal with the latter. In my travels around the nation visiting with residential lenders, what else has their attention? Loan officer recruitment, the area with fabled signing bonuses over the last year or so, is heating up. After two great years and a reduction in pipelines, some MLOs are searching for new homes or at least taking phone calls from recruiters, testing their worth in the open marketplace. Home equity lending is surging. This is an advantage that banks and credit unions are trying to push, and this lending product internally helps banks as they can shift staff from mortgage to HELOC lending (usually less complex). And STRATMOR’s current blog is about how “Lenders Continue to Pivot” in a shift to a purchase-centric focus. (Today’s audio version of the commentary is available here and this week’s is sponsored b