“Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California get all the lawyers? New Jersey got to pick first.” (Hey, I don’t write ‘em.) Quips aside, California accounts for 20 or 25 percent of the nation’s residential lending, depending on who you ask. The Golden State’s economy has been growing steadily while the global economy has at times faltered, and as a result it’s poised to surpass Germany to become the fourth-largest economy on the planet! It jumped seventh-place Brazil and sixth-place France in 2015, and in 2017 it passed the United Kingdom, and has been in fifth place since. The current figures won’t be published until next year, but both Germany and California have a GDP of $3.5 trillion, and one forecast puts California up $72 billion over Germany. And, of course, right in the thick of advocacy and education is the California MBA. If you have questions about the issues that lenders are grappling with out West, contac
Forget about layoffs, salary cuts, revenue problems. There’s extra leftover candy in the lunchroom! Uh… do we still have lunchrooms? I hope so. And Thanksgiving will be here before you know it, and with it, pumpkin pie. (Yes, I know that this is a mortgage commentary, but even pumpkins have their share of regulation and controversy.) Pumpkin is a variety of squash belonging to the “Cucurbitaceae,” or gourd family which also includes melons and cucumbers. The FDA allows for sweet squash blends to be sold under the label of “pumpkin.” Libby’s, for one, uses 100% Dickinson pumpkins in its Libby’s solid pack pumpkin, not squash. Although pumpkins and squash are very closely related, Libby’s denied that it ever used a “blend” of various squashes in its popular canned pumpkin. “But the ‘Libby’s Select’ strain of Pumpkin is a variety of squash belonging to the cucurbitaceae. “The &#
For me, the next ten days includes time in Chicago, the Wisconsin Dells, and Atlanta. It isn’t a scary agenda. At the ready for tonight’s Halloween fun? Polls seem to indicate that the most popular treat is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, followed by Reese’s Miniatures, Twix, Kit Kat, and Snickers. Regardless of treats being handed out at doorsteps, there are “ticks” in an unfortunate affordable housing situation that is an example of the difficulty of implementing housing programs. About 5,600 people live in the ski town of Vail, Colorado. But during the busy season thousands of people work there, and there aren’t enough nearby places to live for that workforce. Right now there’s an estimated deficit of 6,000 beds for the work force in the county, and in order to address that the ski resort Vail sought to build a project on-site to house 165 employees. The town’s existing population got upset, as many residents don’t wa
While investors who “jumped the gun” on establishing their own conforming conventional loan limits ahead of the official proclamation at the end of November by the FHFA are wondering if they “spoke too soon” as values drop, time is rushing by. Kids are back in school, learning about Cuba and having pizza. We’re losing about 3 minutes of daylight a day. Children are picking out Halloween costumes. There are fake Christmas trees in Costco. We don’t turn back the clocks (daylight savings time in all the states except Arizona and Hawaii) for another month, November 6. Things are happening behind the scenes, and today’s Rich and Rob Rundown has Nadia Evangelou, the National Association of Realtor’s Senior Economist and Director of Forecasting, and Jim Parrott, a nonresident fellow at the Urban Institute and owner of Parrott Ryan Advisors. Topics will include FHA pricing moves, FHFA pricing moves, the FHFA on credit scoring models, fore
One can always focus on lending activity hitting a 25-year low, or the once mighty loanDepot reducing its own liquidity or handing raises out to executives, or Better.com’s CEO back in the headlines. So let’s veer off the mortgage track for a bit. Not everyone in residential lending is a baseball fan, but everyone in our biz knows a thing or two about money. Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees hit his 62nd home run of the season, a new record. The ball was caught by a fan, and the question has been raised that has not been answered: “What happens when you take possession of a baseball that is worth $1 million to $2 million? The closest that the IRS has come to answering this is a memo sent in the late 1990s titled the “treasure trove regulation.” When one finds a buried treasure, or in this case catches a million-dollar baseball, it would technically lead to a $332,955 tax bill. If the fan gave the ball back to the player, it could technically trigger