With the drop-off in refinancing, it should be no surprise that lenders' exhibits dominated the huge trade show at the
After all, this is where the leads are. Or at least the 22,000-plus real estate agents whose recommendations often are the deciding factor about where to go for a mortgage. So even a little familiarity with the brand here can go a long way back home.
"We're the eighth largest retail lender nobody has ever heard of," says Bob Armour, chief marketing officer for Guaranteed Rate, a Chicago-based institution with 172 branches covering all 50 states.
The lender's message: "We're Walmart on prices and Zappos on service."
About seven out of every ten home loans Guaranteed Rate writes are already purchase money mortgages.
The lender has just signed an agreement with Ty Pennington, host of the Emmy-winning ABC television show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," to act as its spokesman.
Guaranteed Rate's hire of Pennington was big. But it's booth here was dwarfed by exhibits from the likes of Wells Fargo, Chase and Bank of America. The Wells and B of A stands alone took nearly half the fronts of each of the North and South exhibit halls at the Moscone Convention Center.
They were fighting for attention with real estate franchises, lockboxes, warranty companies and technology vendors, among others. And in proof that no space is off limits when it comes to advertising at a major show like this, Wells Fargo wins the prize for ingenuity. It sponsored the banners designating the halls' aisles.
Over at the Bank of America booth, Ryan Serhant, star of "Million Dollar Listing New York City," made several appearances, as did best-selling author and top real estate trainer Tom Ferry and Vernice "Fly Girl" Armour, America's first African-American female combat pilot.
B of A also said that it has signed up to be a “premier sponsor” of Ferry's enormously popular training summit in Southern California as well as several regional events. Agents pay for those educational programs, but the big bank also agreed with Ferry to sponsor more than 1,000 30-minute office level coaching sessions, which are free to participants.
Bank of America executives on-site declined to say what all this costs. "It's a big investment," says senior vice president Shawn Migliaccie. "But everything you see we capture on video for use by our loan officers in meetings with agents in their local areas over the next three months," Migliaccie says. "This is much more than a four-day weekend."
Meanwhile, if further proof is needed that it may be tough to coax more homeowners out of their comfortably low loan rates, the latest installment of NAR's long-running "Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers" shows that folks are remaining in their current places longer and longer.
People are now staying a median of nine years, up from six to seven years consistently in previous surveys. Driving the longer tenure? People are locking in very low, low rates, says research economist Jessica Lautz.
A healthy part of the market—13% of all sellers—waited to sell their homes because their places weren't worth as much as they owed, according to the survey. And 1% never sold, choosing instead to rent to someone else.
And then there's this nugget: The hardest part of the process is no longer filling out and reading all the paperwork, it's finding the house itself. Housing inventories in many parts of the country are so depleted that buyers are having more difficulty finding the house they eventually purchase.
Lew Sichelman is an independent journalist who has been covering the housing and mortgage markets for more than 40 years.
