Last month, we talked about paying it forward outside your business. This month, I want to dive into more ways to pay it forward within the industry. I’m looking at you, all you seasoned professionals. Let’s talk about important ways you can use your experience and expertise to give back to your company and to our industry.
Yesterday I visited Sacramento to speak to an audience of real estate agents and originators in a joint MGIC/Golden 1 Credit Union event. The mood was good, and much of the discussion was about rent (give or take a little, 50 percent the U.S. is paying 50 percent of their income in rent) and products offered by depositories and portfolio lenders. Attendees also remarked how fast 2022 is moving. We’re fast approaching Memorial Day, marking the unofficial start of summer. Radio stations start playing summer-themed songs (“I thought I knew what love was, what did I know? Those days are gone forever, I should just let them go…”) Time does indeed fly, and it is important to keep things in perspective. Fairway Independent’s Jennifer S. sent over this tweet from Congress. “The median annual pay during the Great Depression was 22 percent of the cost of an average home. Today it’s 14 percent. That means that pay relative to home cost made it easi
As packages of mortgage servicing rights continue to hit the market, and some wonder at the high multiples, know that the percentage of borrowers current on their mortgage payments increased to almost 95 percent, 350 basis points higher than one year ago. Other stats show that foreclosure starts jumped in February. The MBA’s monthly Loan Monitoring Survey also revealed that the total number of loans now in forbearance decreased by 12 basis points to 1.18 percent of servicers’ portfolio volume in the prior month as of February 28, leaving 590k homeowners in forbearance plans. That marks the 21st consecutive month that percentage of borrowers in forbearance has declined. Finally, the percentage of borrowers with existing loan workouts who were current on their mortgage payments improved for the first time since June 2021. Marina Walsh, MBA’s VP of Industry Analysis, said, “These three results (the lower forbearance rates and higher performance rates for bo
If you see someone buying candy, popcorn, and soda at the movies, they must be a drug dealer. There's no other explanation for that type of income! Yes, inflation is moving ahead, faster than most would prefer. A little is good, a lot is not, as we found out yesterday and as we’ve learned for the last several months. U.S. consumer prices jumped 7.5 percent year-over-year in January to hit a four-decade high. Of course, it's important to note that inflation differs across income/demographic cohorts and geographic regions. Rising energy costs were the big driver of the headline number, as were used cars. If you take away seasonal adjustments, the headline CPI rose 8.2 percent. The price appreciation of the past year is only beginning to be reflected in the inflation numbers. Housing is becoming more unaffordable, with rising financing costs and appreciation. At the other end of the scale, as noted in the Commentary last week it is fine for the Biden Administration
While there’s plenty of chatter out there about the return of Better.com’s CEO to its helm, and its interesting business model how LOs are supposedly not paid for closed loans but for how many they lock, I could tell that my cat Myrtle was miffed a few days ago. And I knew why: She figured out that I was not going to spend several hundred dollars to nominate her for some forgettable award. Now that a new year has begun, offers to nominate employees and producers are everywhere, and in some cases, lenders can nominate dozens of their employees at discounted bulk prices. I thought about explaining to Myrtle that she’d be better off with me spending those doubloons on line-caught salmon, or, in my opinion, that every lender would be better off spending their money on training, client retention software, or pricing concessions, rather than telling the world which producers their competitors should pick off. Of course, I was never big on giving a child a trophy just for