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“When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.” In late 2022 vendors and lenders had a taste of the first part of 2023, and it isn’t exactly sweet. No one owns a crystal ball, and if they did, do you really think they’d spend their time telling you about the future rather than sitting on a beach relaxing while their money did the work? In the midst of a dreary winter, who, in places like Michigan, Illinois, or North Dakota, aren’t thinking about the beach? Here’s a site to compete with Expedia that focuses only on enjoyable beach vacations. (We are reminded to continue to enjoy life, since death is in the headlines, most “before their time”: dozens from the storms in California and Alabama, Lisa Marie Presley, Jeff Beck, Charles White…) Continuing with the beach theme, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is poised to ask Florida lawmakers to ban China from buying farmland and residences in Florida. "We do ....
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 ....
Plenty of folks in our biz can be accused of having aprosexia. (No, I didn’t join some “Word of the Day” club.) But lenders and originators have to be pay attention long enough to figure out how to adapt to changes and trends. For example, while building affordable housing is a hot topic, new buildings only account for about a quarter of the affordable housing market. The rest is comprised of Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing, or NOAH, which falls between subsidized housing and high-rent buildings and it often makes sense to preserve it rather than build it. I spent some time in Chicago this week where unfortunately 10% of NOAH housing was lost from 2012-2019. Need leads, not stale ones (always be closing!)? Josh Friend with Insellerate, known for its CRM and lead management, recommends, “Don’t forget the most important thing when buying leads is having real time lead distribution and automated calling, texting, and emailing.” Dealing with ....