While the industry digests Freddie Mac’s first quarter earnings (47 percent purchase, 53 percent refi), if you try to correct my grammar, I will think fewer of you. Speaking of language, did you know that the alphabet in Hawai’i only contains 12 letters: a, e, i, o, u, h, k, l, m, n, p, and w. Every word ends with a vowel. (Sticklers may include an apostrophe – okina - as a separate letter.) I am spending some time in this marvelous area of the world, although a cynic would say, for me, it is merely working from a different place and waking up at 1AM instead of 4AM to send out the commentary. It is 2,500 miles Los Angeles to Honolulu (site of the annual MBAH conference in June), almost half of LA to Tokyo’s 5,500 miles. I mention this because Japan owns $1.3 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities. And some of those have dropped as much as ten points in value since late December. YIKES. But wait… if an investor buys an older pool of mortgages at a price
Change is mandatory. Progress is optional. Are signing bonuses a sign of progress? Perhaps not, and more a continued sign of the competitive times. “A $1 Million Salesperson Signing Bonus is Not a Growth Strategy” is worth a skim. Today’s podcast interview is with me discussing the current rough environment, and as our brethren trail off home from the Texas MBA to the airport in Austin (and actually recognize each other without masks), the talk is about volume and cutbacks. Vendors are being beaten up on price. Long, long gone are the days of padding margins to slow things down as mortgage applications tumble week after week. Refinance volumes have fallen dramatically and are now heavily skewed toward cash-out transactions. Lenders also continue to indicate margins have been cut as much as possible, forcing reductions in capacity to try and control costs as volumes fall. Mid-level management is threatened (do you need district, regional, and divisional managers?) P