Loan Think

Marc Savitt is someone we call a "homer" - a fan who roots for the home team and in this case that home team happens to be mortgage brokers. Savitt, the former head of NAMB, has long believed that the brokerage sector would come back (at least to some degree) and that we would see a trend toward nonbank and depository loan officers switching over to broker status.

I pay attention to tag lines! After the name of the company or the loan originator, a tag line is a phrase that "fills in the blanks" when it comes to providing a little more insight to what you do or what you have to offer your clients.

Fannie Mae has purposely kept its mouth shut regarding its investment in servicing rights - especially its $74 billion MSR purchase from Bank of America this past fall which cost the GSE about 50 basis points. But its days of being super secretive may be coming to an end.

For every 12 relationships that you systematically market to each year, you can expect two transactions. One will be a direct buyer or seller, and the other will be a referral. Compare that to your marketing efforts towards strangers. He found that for every 50 people that you market to that you don’t know, you can expect one transaction. Which approach makes more sense?

I believe that being a baseball or softball umpire (as I've been since 1984) had skills and lessons that very easily translated into the sales process. After all, new umpires are instructed to sell the call through their mannerisms and use of logic on the field.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs revolutionized the computer, phone and music industries. But mortgage banking? Okay, so Apple (from what we know) has no designs on mortgage banking, but it's interesting to think about it because the inventor of the iPhone/iTouch/iPad and other gadgets is sitting on roughly $100 billion of cash and securities.

According to Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke in a speech at the National Association of Home Builders International Builders Show in Orlando, "The state of the housing sector has been a key impediment to a faster recovery."

Over the last 20 years you have all heard me speak of this agency. All federal financial institutions have to file Suspicious Activity Reports with it. The filer may not reveal to anyone this has been done under criminal penalty. The filer does it in good faith and does not even have to be right. It reaches the desks of the FBI, Secret Service and local prosecutors.

First things first: Yes, I can live on $500,000. Heck, I can live on $250,000 a year. Would I like to run Fannie Mae, the government-controlled mortgage giant? Answer: Sure, why not? But first I have a few stipulations.

Recently, we called a trader of nonperforming loans who said quickly, "Can't talk right now. Way too busy." Later on we finally spoke and the message delivered was quite clear: the market for underperforming and nonperforming mortgages appears to be gathering steam.