Loan Think

THIS JUST IN: Paul Best, head of warehouse lending at National City/PNC, is leaving the bank for another job. PNC, of course, had pulled the plug on the business with its last lines drying up a few weeks ago. (Best, who declined to comment, is under contract for a few more months.) Meanwhile, we understand that a handful of warehouse firms are staffing up.

More title insurance firms are easing up on indemnification demands from mortgage companies that are selling REO properties. Late this week First American, Old Republic, and Stewart Title all said they would not demand that REO sellers provide written assurances that everything was kosher with the paperwork.

If your "why" isn’t big enough, you will not develop the "what" you need to do to succeed; nor will you have the fortitude to bear under the "how" to overcome the obstacles that life and this business have yet to throw your way.

Recent news reports that bond investors — including the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and PIMCO — may sue Bank of America because Countrywide Financial Corp. did a bad job of servicing loans that went into ABS/MBS have been a bit misleading.

Yeah, times are tough and you get deals where you can get them, right? But, ask yourself this question—does it take any more work to get a $150,000 deal closed—than it takes to get a $450,000 deal closed?

The mortgage/housing/subprime mess has cost U.S taxpayers billions of dollars, no doubt. But was the crisis caused by incompetence, greed, fraud or some combination of all three? Former S&L regulator Bill Black (a player in the Lincoln Savings/Keating Five Scandal) points out in a recent email that, "No senior official" at a large subprime lender has been convicted for "making fraudulent loans on behalf of the lender (as opposed to secretly ripping off the lender)."

Well, it’s the end of October. The leaves are falling; the weather has begun to change. This signals an important time of the year for me….planning for what looks to be a good 2011 in the reverse mortgage business.

You remember the S&L crisis, I suppose? That's when the Reagan White House deregulated the savings and loan industry – with the blessing of all the Democrats on Capitol Hill – and allowed the not-so-little thrift industry to finance just about anything that moved. (And they did.)

There are three types of shoppers in today's marketplace, according to one retail sales expert, and there are lessons to be learned from the insurance industry on how to not to deal with the most important class of them.

Well, the big MBA show is underway in Atlanta and some industry leaders delivered a message Monday morning that resounds with most seller/servicers: We've had it with buybacks and we're not going to take it anymore. Quicken Loans CEO William Emerson may've said it best when he noted that repurchase requests from secondary market investors are an "annoyance."