What We're Hearing

Industry executives continue to talk about what kind of pricing power Washington Mutual, Seattle, will have in the secondary market once it swallows both HomeSide, Jacksonville, and Dime Bancorp, New York, the parent of North American Mortgage. The big question is what type of guarantee fee deal WaMu can extract out of Fannie Mae which buys most of WaMu's conventional production. G-fees are a major driver of earnings for both Fannie and Freddie Mac. During the first nine months of this year Fannie earned $1.084 billion off of g-fees. In the third quarter Fannie had average g-fee income of 19.2 basis points, Freddie 18.5 basis points...

Homestore.com, the struggling online real estate listing service, is in hot water. The dot-com is being sued by its shareholders and trading in its stock has been halted for a week -- and counting. Moreover, records show that company insiders have been trying to dump shares. In an SEC filing dated Dec. 3 Homestore insider Stephen Baird filed to sell 6,250 shares of restricted stock. It is not known if Mr. Baird actually dumped his shares, but according to the filing he would've reaped $21,875 in proceeds. Amazingly, Goldman Sachs rates the stock "market perform..."

A new Morgan Stanley research report on LandAmerica Financial Group, Richmond, Va., says the company is undervalued and the stock has a 75% upside. The title insurer/real estate service provider is planning a stock buy-back program as well. LandAmerica, however, will discontinue development of TitleQuest, its backoffice title production software and instead will buy the software externally...