Loan Think

If you were listening to Ally Financial's fourth quarter earnings conference call this morning (as I was) you would've been struck by two things: (1)Boy, this company loves all facets of the auto finance business (2)it doesn't seem to fear, in the least, residential buyback claims from investors who bought GMAC's nonprime MBS during the go-go years.

Given all the trouble the mortgage broker industry has been through in the past three years, if a loan officer went up to his or her friends and told them he or she was opening up their own shop, the LO would get back a very puzzled look at best.

What will the legacy of the robo-signing scandal be? Will it be more careful servicers who don’t cut corners under pressure from huge pipelines of foreclosures? Will it be large settlement payouts by the largest servicers involved in the mess?

There's talk that an Irvine-based company called Roosevelt Management has received significant backing from Texas Pacific Group to buy distressed residential mortgage loans and has been quite active lately. A few of Roosevelt's top executives used to work at C-BASS.

As of Jan. 1, the Department of Real Estate has issued over 22,000 mortgage loan originator license endorsements. MLO license endorsements applications continue to flood in and the DRE expects to eventually issue over 30,000 endorsements. (cadrepr12011)

THIS JUST IN: A West Coast-based nonbank plans to make a big splash in the wholesale market and is busy hiring account executives. At last check the firm had almost 15 AEs signed on with half of them coming from (you guessed it) Bank of America. For the full story, see the Monday paper edition of National Mortgage News. Don't subscribe? Call: 800-221-1809…

Okay, so Sen. Rand Paul, the Tea Party darling from Kentucky, wants to kill the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which contains the very popular FHA program. (See the National Mortgage News website for details.) And yes, he's dreaming., but as the late great Stan Strachan once said: "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story."

Early next week Ally Financial will release its fourth quarter results and chances are the government owned mega bank will post some decent results in its mortgage division. What are we basing this prediction on? Well, first off, Residential Capital Corp. (the mortgage unit) is a top ranked correspondent buyer of home mortgages, a sector in which profit margins have been particularly strong.

It used to be that trade groups were the "optimistic" ones, always putting a nice spin on the numbers. (Remember NAR economist David Lereah?) But the Mortgage Bankers Association has seen the future of the business and the next two years are looking a bit dicey. In a new forecast MBA projects $966 billion in total industry production this year and $976 billion next year.

One of the things I enjoy most is reading books on sales and influence (also known as persuasion). It may sound strange to you at first. But stop and think about it. Isn’t everything we do everyday involved in persuasion and trying to convince someone to do what you want?