“What do hospital gowns and insurance policies have in common? You’re never covered as much as you think you are.” Although loan officers are not insurance experts, they are seeing the escalating cost of homeowner’s insurance impact affordability. (Last Friday’s TMC show focused on why insurance costs are rising.) Insuring homes is not the only issue, however. The average bill for the repair of an American vehicle is $4,437, and for an electric vehicle that is up to $6,618, about 49 percent higher. Collision insurance claims have increased 64 percent between 2018 and 2022, fueled by increasingly sophisticated cars and more complicated things that need to get fixed when they get broken. No longer are we just hammering out dents, but rather we’re taking computers out of the car and fixing it. Insurance costs may be on the agenda (the why’s mortgage rates certainly will be) when the California Association of Mortgage Professionals (CAMP) pr
“I am part of the 4 percent who want to ban the teaching of math. We are a quarter of the country, and we will not be ignored! And that number is growing; soon we will be a fifth of the country!” While we’re being quantitative… Everyone knows that there are 50 stars on the United States Flag. In 1945 there were 48, before Alaska and Hawai’i were granted statehood. Someone should have told the folks who filmed or fact checked “Oppenheimer.” Continuing with numbers, the South or Midwest, which also boast the highest U.S. homeownership rates, are also the regions that have the highest rental vacancies in the nation, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Housing Vacancies and Homeownership data. The Midwest had the nation’s highest homeownership rate (70 percent) in the first quarter of 2023, followed by the South (67), Northeast (63) and West (62 percent). A bigger share of homeowners (41.6 percent) than renters (28.7 percent)
Well, what should we start with today? How about how California and Texas ranked highest on the United States Postal Service’s annual list of states with the most dog bites against its employees? Or how ‘bout Freedom Mortgage Corporation filing a notice of data breach after learning that confidential consumer data entrusted to the company was subject to unauthorized access, the result of a cybersecurity incident at one of the company’s vendors, Mortgage Industry Advisory Corporation (“MIAC”)? Data is critical in so many things, whether it is closing a branch, not caring if an LO heads to another company, or in determining that people can save money by buying books at Amazon instead of the local book shop. Along those lines, Saturday’s Commentary, noting the CFPB’s use of its funding to determine that different companies charge different prices, received, as you can imagine, a lot of responses. Think residential lenders have too many regu
Sure, Fannie had $5.2 billion of net income in the fourth quarter of 2021, but money can’t buy you love. Love is more of a chemical reaction than a statistical study, but computers don’t deal so well with that. But stats will tell you that apparently the best place to find love is Buffalo, New York. Lending Tree released a report considering seven variables, including median single-person household income as well as the percentage of the population that isn’t married, or lives alone, to help determine which of the nation’s 50 largest metros are the best for single people. Rounding out the top five were Cleveland, Louisville, Detroit, and a tie between St. Louis and New Orleans. MLOs know that because single people often can’t rely on a “significant other” to bring in extra income, they need to take extra care that they’ve got enough money to make ends meet… or make a mortgage payment so areas with low costs of living can b
America's national debt topped $30 trillion for the first time, according to figures from the Treasury Department on Tuesday. Why might it matter for mortgage rates? When one combines a record amount of red ink, an aging population, elevated healthcare costs, and a tax system that doesn’t bring in enough revenue to cover spending, and a government that has become known for kicking fiscal cans down the road, well, you can see why there are worries about the long-term economic health of the country. Ignore at your own peril. Something else plenty of people ignore is climate change, natural or manmade, until it impacts their business model and profits. Mortgage analytics firm RiskSpan has collaborated with Verisk to create a first-of-its-kind solution for measuring and mitigating the risks of climate change to the housing finance industry. Dismiss the impact of climate if you like, but when leading insurance, re-insurance, corporate and government entities, and investors i