THIS JUST IN: It appears that certain account executives from CitiMortgage are quietly contacting some of their top performing brokers to see if they would like to rejoin the flock. For full details see the Monday edition of National Mortgage News. Don't subscribe? Call: 800-221-1809...
Intergr8tive Lending of Irvine, Calif., is offering consumers FHA loans and they only need to put 0.5% down. Company vice president Ken Schisler explained it to me like this: the first lien is for 96.5% of the home's price. Then there's a 3% second lien. "All they need is half-a-percent down to get into the home," he said...
The three biggest underserved markets right now: jumbo loans, super jumbo loans and mortgages to self-employed Americans. It's a gap as wide as Texas, at least that seems to be the message I received from a handful of LOs this past week. If you see other underserved segments drop me an e-mail at
If you would like a complete list of the nation's top jumbo lenders send an e-mail to
Early next week publicly traded mortgage vulture fund PennyMac Mortgage Investment Trust will release its fourth-quarter earnings. However, on Friday its stock hit a new 52-week low, $16.01 on heavily volume. It has analyzed billions of dollars in troubled loans for purchase but has not bought much to date. It also has formed a conduit. PennyMac is the brainchild of former Countrywide president Stanford Kurland. Mr. Kurland appears in the new paperback version of "Chain of Blame." A new chapter in the book is entitled "TARP, the Great Recession and the Return of Stan Kurland." Mr. Kurland talked to my co-author Matt Padilla of The Orange County Register. Matt writes the "Mortgage Insider" column for the paper. The new book has a white cover and can be found at
Is the private-label MBS market coming back? It all depends on your definition of "coming back." And "private label." It's likely that Wall Street will never securitize any newly originated subprime loans again. Maybe, it's all over for subprime. But there seems to be a growing market for "private money" loans. That story, too, is in Monday's NMN as well as an outlook piece from Brian Collins on the coming boom in "short sales." Meanwhile, there is talk of a hedge fund in New York starting a new jumbo conduit. It's unclear whether the conduit will securitize existing jumbos or newly originated ones. Bonnie Sinnock has written about the issue before in her "Street Smarts" column...
THE MAIN EVENT: Perhaps it was obvious. Back in 2006 Tishman Speyer Properties teamed up with BlackRock Realtyand paid $5.4 billion for the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, a redbrick oasis of middle-class affordability in downtown Manhattan (New York City, not Kansas). Built by Metropolitan Life, "StuyTown" was affordable because of rent-control laws, which limited how much the landlord could jack up the monthly. (In case you live on Mars, NYC rents can be pretty hefty. If you want affordable, go to Newark. It's on the PATH train.) StuyTown encompasses 80 acres and multiple buildings holding 11,227 apartments. The complex was built in the 1940s by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. and housed many GIs and their families coming home from the war. The play by BlackRock and Tishman was simple: put little money down (which they did), hire lawyers to rip out the rent controls, and take that baby condo/co-op. Well guess what? Answer: Not even NYC real estate is immune from the Great Recession. Black & Tish could not rip out the rent controls and when the property dropped in value big time (by at least half) you can figure out the rest. NMN's Glenn McCullom talked to a few renters there about the mess. One told him, "I have no sympathy for Tishman Speyer. From the first, tenants saw them as predators. I personally know three people Tishman tried to force out of their rent-stabilized apartments on the grounds that the apartments were not their main residence." The landlord lost in all three cases but not before putting these tenants through the wringer - two or more years of expensive litigation. Another long-term tenant, Celeste Harris, 77, told NMN, "Well, I'm just waiting for the garbage to start piling up." Black & Tish are now in default and the banks are about to take over. As Gordon Gecko once said, "Greed is good" - but he never worked in mortgages...
DATA POINT: Flagstar ranked second among all warehouse providers in terms of commitments for the period ending Sept. 30, according to survey results from NMN. The info also appears in our Quarterly Data Report which ranks the nation's top servicers and more. E-mail
DATA NOTICE No. 1: Planning for the rest of 2010 and need soup-to-nuts statistics on the nation's top residential (and commercial) lenders and servicers? The new MortgageStats.com data product might be what you're looking for. The user-friendly M-Stats is Web-based and incorporates both the Quarterly Data Report and our annual Mortgage Industry Directory. Among other things, it has annual rankings on the top 400 lenders and servicers, including breakdowns on retail, wholesale, and correspondent - and news archives. There's contact info, too, and plenty of data on servicing. And here's the best part: you get quarterly updates. To see a sample send an e-mail to
DATA NOTICE No. 2: Even though we have just launched our new MortgageStats.com product you can still subscribe to the Quarterly Data Report, a spreadsheet product that provides readers with quarterly rankings on the nation's top lenders and servicers. There's also a companion product called the Alt-QDR which provides rankings on second liens, jumbos and much more. Again, shoot an e-mail to
THE LAST WORD: J.D. Salinger, may he rest in peace. Go read his short story "The Laughing Man."
