Stocks decline in thin trade ahead of key data - BusinessWorld Online bworldonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bworldonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The MBA’s servicing conference is taking place, and it is an important subject, along with the impact of the 30bp cut in MIP for FHA borrowers. Owning servicing rights certainly helped the bottom lines for many lenders last year, some would say it “saved their bacon.” There are always those warning us of impending doom and gloom scenarios regarding the trillions of mortgages outstanding. But really, come on. We may see an uptick in delinquencies and foreclosures, possibly because the numbers are so low now there’s nowhere to go but up. Borrowers have outstanding credit quality, and huge amounts of equity. And investors and the government offer many loss mitigation options. The industry has other things to worry about. Meanwhile, owners of mortgage servicing rights continue to sell packages, large and small, for various reasons, not the least of which is to raise cash. For the uninitiated who’d like to know exactly what a “servicing package
As noted in yesterday’s commentary, mergers and acquisitions of lenders are in the news across the nation. For curious lenders, it is good to have a general guide in how a buyer goes about valuing a lender. I happen to be in rainy Chicago now, but 1,700 miles away, there’s interesting news from the Phoenix area and the desert. How would you appraise a perfectly fine home that had no water? Rio Verde, aptly named Green River, a neighborhood outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, with some 2,000 homes, recently learned that there is not a stable water supply. The 1980s Groundwater Management Act required that in order for a development six lots or larger to proceed in Arizona, it had to secure a 100-year supply of water. The Rio Verde Foothills developers kept splitting parcels into four to five lots, putting them under the six-lot minimum that applied to the law and avoiding that requirement. About 30 percent of the residents now face a dramatic change in price as the city has cu