Loan Think

Perhaps, hard money (read: subprime) has a bright future after all. Consider this: if the White House and Congress cannot strike a deal on raising the U.S. debt ceiling interest rates will spike.

Marketing your mortgage origination business should be a year-round event. But, according to Chase's Annual List of Events, it takes on an even bigger prominence in June.

As we all know, the mortgage application market has picked up some steam the past few weeks thanks to lower interest rates. And as we also know, loan brokers are suffering because of the new compensation rules.

Federal agents are investigating homebuyers in Arizona who are illegally taking advantage of the dip in home prices. Bob Bemiss leads the Arizona MLS, utilized by 30,000 Realtors in the state. He's been juggling stacks of subpoenas from FBI agents. Bemiss said recently they have been coming to town in waves, asking for piles of documents from real estate transactions.

THIS JUST IN: Are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac finally contemplating unloading some of their nonperforming loans onto the secondary market? One player in the NPL space said the two GSEs—which have toyed with the idea for the better part of a year—are once again considering doing something.

Remember when Donald Trump owned a mortgage brokerage firm? It was early last decade and from what I recall Trump Mortgage (or whatever the thing was called) wasn’t exactly a market leader. And when ‘The Donald’ saw that trouble was on the way in mortgageland USA he did what any smart businessman would do: he ran for the hills and closed the thing down.

Perhaps, one day we will all look back at the past two years and say, “Boy, that was a great time to buy a house – prices were so low, and so were rates.” Well, we know the rate part is correct, as for whether we’ve reached a bottom in home values, the jury is still out.

Those poor Brits. Not only did they lose the Colonies to that rabble-rouser George Washington, but one of their biggest banks, HSBC, made a $14 billion mistake back in 2003 by purchasing then subprime giant Household Finance.

It’s probably no surprise that Freddie Mac made money in the first quarter while Fannie Mae continued to bleed red ink out of its financial oil pan. Consider this: Fannie reported a 72% spike in loan repurchase requests in the first quarter, a sign that its legacy portfolio (read: all those crappy loans it bought from Countrywide) is continuing to deteriorate in quality.

Among the headlines from the recent Mortgage Bankers Association National Secondary Market Conference in New York is that economists from the trade group have declared that the refinance boom is dead.