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
In the secondary markets, lenders are trying to wring out every penny from loan sales. For example, in today’s podcast (available here) is an interview with Senior Director of MCT’s Investor Services team, Jennifer Kennelly, on MCT’s Bid Auction Manager (BAM) Marketplace, the nation’s first open mortgage loan exchange. In the primary markets, it’s rough, and I received this note from a senior executive. “In our branches, this is worse than the meltdown. In 2008-2010 we may have had problems finding lenders to loan money, but there were some, and we still had business. And rates were okay. Today we barely have any business and rates are so high borrowers become angry at us when we quote them!” And the cost of doing business is continuing to escalate. “NCRA understands that the end users of the tri-merge mortgage credit report (the mortgage lenders) have been grouped into three pricing tiers by Fair Isaac (FICO) with a wholesale pri
Forget about layoffs, salary cuts, revenue problems. There’s extra leftover candy in the lunchroom! Uh… do we still have lunchrooms? I hope so. And Thanksgiving will be here before you know it, and with it, pumpkin pie. (Yes, I know that this is a mortgage commentary, but even pumpkins have their share of regulation and controversy.) Pumpkin is a variety of squash belonging to the “Cucurbitaceae,” or gourd family which also includes melons and cucumbers. The FDA allows for sweet squash blends to be sold under the label of “pumpkin.” Libby’s, for one, uses 100% Dickinson pumpkins in its Libby’s solid pack pumpkin, not squash. Although pumpkins and squash are very closely related, Libby’s denied that it ever used a “blend” of various squashes in its popular canned pumpkin. “But the ‘Libby’s Select’ strain of Pumpkin is a variety of squash belonging to the cucurbitaceae. “The &#
While we had news today of the British Prime Minister resigning, yesterday my doctor asked if anyone in my family suffers from mental illness. I replied, "No, we all seem to enjoy it." Suffering from a lack of liquidity is the death knell for lenders and certainly nothing to joke about. Want to know the quickest way to shut your business down? Don’t return your warehouse bank’s phone call. In the secondary markets, if no one is interested in buying the products we’re manufacturing, that isn’t good news. So headlines of stories in the Wall Street Journal like, “Recession Fears Hit Risky Mortgage Debt Amid Default Concerns” are a real problem. (Subscription needed.) Housing and lending, “upstream” and “downstream,” is our focus, and economist Elliot Eisenberg summed things up. “With 30-year mortgage rates steadily climbing and now at 7 percent, it is unsurprising the NAHB Housing Market Index f
Now we have a butter shortage raising prices ahead of the holidays. Great. While margarine makers are licking their chops over the news, vegans and other readers should know that no animals are ever harmed in the making of this commentary! But speaking of harm, in the current environment, and probably for the next couple quarters, vendors and lenders working 30 percent harder to make 40 percent less. Or worse. If the Fed’s actions can push asset prices higher, it’s actions can also push asset prices lower, right? Indeed, many will argue that is what we’re seeing now, and despite the Fed making its future actions clear, I am reminded of the old saying, “Don’t fight the Fed.” So be cautious when seeing any rate move down. (More below in the capital markets section.) Many in our industry are using this lull in business activity to attend conferences (last week’s Mortgage Collaborative conference had over 400 registered; this week’s M