As Brian B. reminds me, “In the New England you can tell the changing of the seasons by the changing color of the leaves. In Florida you can tell the changing of the seasons by the changing colors of the license plates.” Speaking of moves, geography, and distance, if you’re a lender or a vendor, how’s your 2023 travel and entertainment budget shaping up? I figured. The Mortgage Bankers Association believes (some say optimistically) that total mortgage origination volume will decline to $2.05 trillion in 2023 from the $2.26 trillion expected in 2022. The “pie” will shrink, and every lender is striving to increase customer service. Under the category of “Know your clients,” buyers who bought homes in the year from June 2021 to June 2022 moved a median of 50 miles away from their previous residences, a huge increase. Over the preceding five years it was pretty much flat at a median of 15 miles, which was the highest going back to 200
As the MBA’s conference in Nashville wraps up, lenders and vendors are in an interesting mindset. Optimists are saying, “There’s a lot of opportunity out there” and, “Rates will come back down and refis will give us some oomph.” The pessimists are saying, “Why do I care about multi-year Agency goals when I’ll be lucky to make it through the next two quarters. We’re just trying to cut costs fast enough, including LO comp, and outlast our competition.” Lenders everywhere are doing what they can now to make themselves more efficient, fearing rougher times ahead. Banks and credit unions are looking at cross-training skillsets: Prioritizing coverage and making sure to cross-train so people can play to their strengths. Analyzing what tasks they're doing, and the best people to do it. Workflow? Lenders are minimizing file touches, using a cheaper resource for parts of the file, and moving more duties from underwriti
You can rest assured that no animals were harmed in the making of this commentary! But the harm felt by stockholders during the last several months has not been trivial, and not only confined to lenders. As has been discussed in this Commentary, just because the open market can see their stock prices fall doesn’t mean those companies are faring any worse, or better, than non-public companies. And other companies in related industries have not fared much better. For example, Redfin (a full-service real estate brokerage that owns lender Bay Equity) hit a high of over $95 a share and hit a low a few weeks ago of $7.13. Put another way, if you had sunk your life savings of $1 million into Redfin stock in February of 2021 your life savings would stand at $75,000. Ouch. The speed and magnitude of the rate move in 2022 has hurt many, but to keep things in perspective remember that the highest interest rates were in October 1981, a whopping 18.45 percent. Fortunately, no one is talking
In a coup for Black Knight, the deal is the latest in a growing trend as lenders see servicing as a way to smooth out revenue and retain past customers.