The Ides of March… And college basketball time. Here in Kentucky (men #6 in the East, Louisville women’s team #5) I overheard someone on the phone. “Yesterday I saw a woman in Walmart with March Madness teeth. She was down to her final four.” March Madness is in full swing, whether it is hoops or bonds. Or bank stocks. Is this really a fundamental structural plunging of the United States’ financial system? Doubtful. Moody’s came out with a warning about downgrading certain banks in the United States. It is not 2008. How much of this is psychology? Tweeting causing a run on deposits? Banks everywhere are looking at their liabilities (deposits, since they owe their depositors money) and assets (the money lent out using their depositor’s money, or securities owned. “Lending long and borrowing short” works when banks can pay very little on their deposits (like checking accounts earning 0 percent) and take that money and earn 4
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
My cat Myrtle has toys and games, namely the end of a shoelace, a ping pong ball, and an occasional bout with the light from a laser pointer. Humans have toys too, and here are the top ones from the year you were born. (More fun to look at the years when you’re 5 or 8.) Some of those are big bucks now, speaking of which, everyone out there is trying to save money. Here’s one way: for loan officers requiring continuing education, you only have a couple weeks to complete your 2022 CE classes. If your company is a Lenders One Member, your classes are free! (No, this isn’t a paid ad; contact Tricia Migliazzo for information.) And this may be on the test: The six criteria that make up the completed mortgage loan application are: A – Address of the subject property, L – Loan amount requested, I – Income of applicant, E – Estimated value of mortgage loan application, N – Names of borrowers, S – Social Security Number. There is you
For some reason, companies laying off large numbers of people (most recently Better, Freedom, Mr. Cooper) make headlines, whereas shouldn’t the unusual, like companies that aren’t laying off anyone or who are hiring, be more newsworthy? There are indeed companies that are not laying off anyone, and in fact are hiring to take advantage of slow times. There is other good news. Despite inflation, elevated mortgage rates, and slowing sales activity, severely limited housing inventory will prevent large home price drops for most of the country next year according to NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun in his 2023 outlook. “For most parts of the country, home prices are holding steady since available inventory is extremely low. Some places are experiencing price gains, while some places, most notably in California, are seeing prices pull back… Housing inventory is about a quarter of what it was in 2008, distressed property sales are almost non-existent, at just 2%, a
Click n' Close launches proprietary SmartBuy loan suite to provide low- and moderate-income homebuyers with more affordable mortgage options tippnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from tippnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.