Rick Grant & Associates

Costa Mesa, Calif.-based PriceMyLoan (PML) has integrated its Point of Sale automated eligibility and pricing tool with Freddie Mac’s Loan Prospector, the company said. The integration allows originators to obtain decisions from Loan Prospector from within the PML system. Originators query PML’s web-based engine to determine which products their borrowers qualify for and to obtain current pricing for those products.
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In this blog, we do our best to focus on the positive, to provide executives who are intent on driving their companies to success with the information they can use to be more successful. Success depends upon our ability to fully comprehend the environment we’re competing in so that we can make the best possible decisions. With the bailout plan nearing its final planning stages, now is a good time to pause and review. While I’ve been known to endorse the Ready, Fire, Aim methodology, this might be a time to step back and take a closer look at the evolving situation in the U.S. economy.
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While I can’t say that I knew that Lehman Brothers would be the next Wall Street firm to fall, there were plenty of pundits who had been saying that the other shoe had yet to drop. Watching the dust swirl after this weekend’s announcements, it appears that this might actually be part two of the double bottom Mark Dangelo has been talking about for months. Dangelo and others are talking today about going back to the old models for U.S. banking.

That seems reasonable. Wall Street will go back to selling shares of public companies and depository institutions will again become leaders in the home finance business. Monoline mortgage banks will become departments within other banks, like Countrywide and Bank of America.

But what about the other players that were, to some degree, the children of Wall Street’s real estate empire? Read the rest of this entry »

Even as many in the home finance industry are reeling from the news that the federal government has stepped in to take control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, TransUnion reports that mortgage loan delinquency rates rose again this quarter, up nearly 9 percent from the first quarter 2008. This was the sixth quarter of rising delinquencies, according to TransUnion.

Mortgage loan delinquency, defined as the ratio of borrowers 60 or more days past due to those that are paying as agreed, hit a national average high of 3.53 percent for the second quarter of 2008. TransUnion says this statistic is up more than nine percent from the previous quarter’s 3.23 percent average and up approximately 51 percent from the same period last year. Read the rest of this entry »

One definition of a recession is based on two consecutive quarters of negative growth in the U.S. real gross domestic product. While many economists have already decided that we are in one, and who in the housing industry could argue with that, one expert is not so sure we are. According to the most recent issue of economic futurist Jeff Thredgold’s Tea Leaf, we are not technically in a recession right now, and we may not be in the near future.

According to his estimates, the economy will continue to rebound next year after working its way through what he calls a “W-shaped period of economic performance.” He graphs it in his most recent issue. Read the rest of this entry »