It’s important to be stylish; just ask Pope Francis. (Page down once or twice to see the fake image. And we wish the 86-year-old a speedy recovery from a respiratory infection.) Being Pope has its pluses and minuses, from an occupational perspective, but, returning to mortgage banking, the next time you’re rolling your eyes at a difficult loan file, or exasperated with the behavior of a whiny client, remember that there are worse professions. Being a real estate agent is not bad either. (Remember, not all real estate agents are Realtors, with a capital “R,” and there are many fine agents that aren’t.) Per this source there are 1,548,058 Realtors in the United States as of January, 2023. There are only 578,000 active listings nationwide. You can do the math. Do you have the product set to help those buyers? I don’t know how much it costs real estate brokerages to have their name listed in HW (HousingWire)’s “1,061 real estate broke
“SMONDAY: The moment when Sunday stops feeling like a Sunday and the anxiety of Monday kicks in.” Do you think the shareholders and management of Credit Suisse felt that, given Credit Suisse is being purchased by UBS for $3.3 billion? Remember when CS was a renowned jumbo buyer? Now we can watch the layoffs. The CS price per share marked a 99 percent decline from Credit Suisse’s peak in 2007. Mark Twain said, "The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.” The S&L Crisis certainly happened, but have regulators, auditors, and rating agencies forgotten about it? Under the “getting ready to fight the last war” category, the Federal Reserve is evaluating tougher rules for midsized banks after the failures of Silicon Valley Bank (SIVB) and Signature Bank (SBNY). It is looking at tougher capital and liquidity requirements and could beef up annual "stress tests" that assess banks
Pi Day has come around once again, which is also, coincidentally, Albert Einstein’s birthday. As I head to Lexington for the MBA Kentucky Education Conference, led by Alan Thorup, Matt O. sent, “I have an idea: We organize a 10k race in San Jose and call it ‘The Bank Run.’” (While we’re on sports, a moment of silence for Dick Fosbury who revolutionized the high jump in the mid-1960’s). High jumpers have a soft pad to land on, not so with some bank stocks Monday. Western Alliance Bancorp, supplier of warehouse lines to many an independent mortgage banker and parent of AmeriHome, First Republic Bank, Metropolitan Bank, PacWest Bancorp, and First Horizon. Fortunately, many have “bounced” but these are all non-money-center banks seemingly causing risk to the U.S. financial system. In Banking 101 one learns that borrowing short (by holding customer deposits) to lend long (by purchasing long bonds and MBS) to improve returns is b
While the musical world mourns the loss of Gary Rossington, the last original Lynyrd Skynyrd band member, and I head to San Diego this morning for the TMC event, but I’ve heard through channels that my cat Myrtle is thinking about copywriting her trill after hearing the news that the Toblerone candy company is removing the Matterhorn from its label due to pressure from Swiss authorities: 80 percent of raw materials must come from Switzerland, so it’s a numbers game. Being a loan officer is a numbers game: so many calls and emails per day, yield so many call backs, yield so many applications, yield so many eventual closings. Day after day, and it is not glamorous. There’s a dog team race that is also a numbers game. The 1,000-mile Iditarod kicked off in Willow, Alaska, 70 miles north of Anchorage, with a finish line in Nome. This year there are only 33 mushers, a record low since the first race in 1973. The average number of starts in the first 50 races was 63 conte
Here in Las Vegas (Why did the Dalai Lama go to Las Vegas? Because he loves Tibet) the population is about 650,000 with all manners of housing, subdivisions, and lifestyles. But around the nation and world, there are numerous ways and places to live. Here’s a story about a former NFL star who says he saved money by living inside Cincinnati Bengals stadium. What do Stowe, Vermont, Whitefish, Montana, and Lake Placid, New York have in common? The three U.S. towns made Travel & Leisure’s 25 Most Beautiful Small Towns. If you only want a house for part of the year, with elevated mortgage rates and home prices having risen considerably, the solution might be buying 1/6 of a house. Or sharing equity, which is what some of your borrowers and homeowner clients consider. “An Unlock HEA gives you cash in exchange for a portion of your home’s future value.” Or one can live underwater. (Today’s podcast can be found here and this week’s i