“My dad always said to me, ‘Work until your bank account looks like a phone number’ so I did. Account balance: $9.11.” You can work harder, or you can work smarter. (I have severe doubts about the validity of this clip; it gave me the willies watching it.) Swimming is certainly a competitive sport. Do you have competitors? Most businesses do. Which is a reason that hotels offer free ice, thanks to a hotel chain that began in Memphis, TN. If the Mortgage Bankers Association is right, and volume does pick up some in 2024, that doesn’t mean the competition to do that business is going to go away. Numbers game. 5 calls, 25 a week, one closed loan $4k, two loans $8k. At these rates, less competition. If rates come down, competition for inventory just increases. (Today’s podcast can be found here, and this week’s is sponsored by the STRATMOR Group, the data-driven mortgage advisory. At STRATMOR, insights and knowledge are applied to guide mort
“Affordable” means many things. There are residential lending industry jokes about making a loan on anything with axles or a license plate. (Like “don’t.”) Being “permanently affixed” is usually in the underwriting guidelines, which makes this story about someone having their driveway stolen very interesting. (In this clip a builder explains how the scam works.) There are plenty of trends in the builder world, one of which is “build for rent.” Instead of just having a house here or there, BFR homes are clustered together and form a community, much like an apartment community, and with many of the same amenities, essentially an apartment building as a defined community. This new “asset class” even has its own conference. The category is usually not a good thing for IMBs or small banks or credit unions. (Today’s podcast can be found here, and this week’s is sponsored by the STRATMOR Group, the data
Susan Toste writes to Ira Selwin who sends me (see how these things work?), “Can you believe it is 364 days until Christmas and people already have their lights up?” Goldman Sachs asks interviewees, "How many square feet of pizza are eaten in the U.S. each year?" (The trick is to work through the logic, not necessarily come up with the right answer.) Learning math is something that everyone does, to one degree or another, and doesn’t typically go onto a resume. (I learned math a whole different way than they do now in China or Japan.) What’s on your resume? How about Scapulothoracic Hypermobility? The Financial Times reports that “Banks (worldwide) shed 60,000 jobs in one of worst years for cuts since financial crisis.” I regularly receive questions about the number of LOs who have left our business. “Plenty” doesn’t ever satisfy the person asking the question, but I don’t know the exact number. Man
Did you receive any SM under the tree this weekend? Call it snail mucus, or snail mucin, it’s all the same to me, which, as a kid, represented a trail to something I could direct the sun’s rays on using my magnifying glass. (Sorry, when you’re a kid on a very limited budget, this counts as amusement.) But times change and now it’s a beauty product? “Next level!” Really? SM aside, Depth’s Kerri Milam reminded me that the key difference between initials and acronyms is that we pronounce acronyms as a word and initials as a list of letters. Put another way, Fannie Mae is an acronym, as is First American Title (FAT), FHA is a set of initials. NASA or ASAP versus MD or DFW. Throw in some numbers and you have… license plates. For those curious, here is a list of vanity license plates rejected by the state of Illinois. Of course, this has nearly nothing to do with mortgages. First American Financial’s customer service woes continu
“The officer said, ‘You drinking?’ I said, ‘You buying?’ We just laughed and laughed.. It’s Friday morning and I need bail money.” No one ever struck it rich by keeping their money in a savings account, although American Express National Bank is offering a yield of 1.5 percent on deposits. Do you work for a residential lender making money? If so, good for you! The Mortgage Bankers Association tells us, in its Quarterly Mortgage Bankers Performance Report, that only 57% of lenders were profitable in the second quarter of 2022, and/but on average independent mortgage banking (IMB) firms and mortgage subsidiaries of federally insured depositories lost $82 on each loan they originated (versus a gain of $223 per loan in 1Q22). Lenders who held onto servicing enjoyed a profit of $133 per loan, down from $242 per loan in the first quarter. We’re more than halfway through the 3rd quarter, and I am not hearing good things about July income