Hal M. writes, “Monday is a holiday. The observance reminded me of the small Italian parade we had in Maine on Columbus Day. All the marchers were under 5 foot 4.” Bah dah bum. Clients come in all shapes and sizes. An experienced loan originator will tell you, “Never tell a client about a problem until you’ve solved it.” An originator will also, when talking to a client, show them that their timing matters more than market timing. Put another way, home price appreciation is earned by buying a place and holding it, rather than timing the purchase based on interest rates. Roughly speaking, there are 4.8 million real estate sales in a given year, and 3.6 million of them will have a loan. Figure about 1.3 million refinances, which gives us a total of about 4.9 million mortgage transactions. These include debt consolidation refinances, moving out of 3 percent loans but paying off 30 percent credit card debt with a 7.5 percent loan. Originators are telling
California Adopts New Regulations to Address Home Insurance Crisis theepochtimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theepochtimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
By Douglas Page As insurance executives might see it, the 21st century gold rush is outside of California. To others in the Golden State, it could appear
One of the topics here in Tennessee is how lenders can help real estate agents or clients. Wanna maybe help your client or favorite real estate agent grappling with inventory? HUD has a “Home store” of houses. Worth a shot at 3.5 percent down properties! For something to really start your synapses firing on a Monday morning ahead of a five day work week, the CEO of the California MBA, Susan Milazzo, sent, “The latest effort to pass legislation to address California’s insurance crisis has died. Assembly Democrats felt that the bill favored insurance companies over consumers, and they wanted to add a provision that would prohibit insurance companies from not renewing any business through the end of next year. With no real guarantee of when the commissioner would do the emergency regulations or the contents of those regulations, it amounted to a poison pill.” (More insurance news below in the “disaster” section.) (Today’s podcast can
Born in Ukraine, Golda Meir said, “Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you are aboard there is nothing you can do about it." (Doubtful anyone called her Goldy.) Her time as the Prime Minister of Israel ended in 1974, and since that time oldsters in our biz have seen the yield curve invert ten times, give or take. Bond traders are no longer fully convinced that the Federal Reserve will do one more quarter-point interest-rate hike, given the nervousness about First Republic and fear of an economic downturn; recessions have tended to lag yield curve inversions by 6 to 18 months. (STRATMOR’s current blog is “The Yield Curve Is Inverted: Should Lenders Care?”) Politics are also on trader’s radar screens: A failure by Congress to raise the debt ceiling and prevent a default on US government debt would result in an "economic catastrophe" that will push interest rates higher for even longer, per Treasury Secretary J