Rick Grant & Associates

Photo: by Worldsurfer

Despite an environment that rivals the Great Depression, at least from the standpoint of the mortgage lending industry, mortgage bankers from around the country have descended upon San Francisco for the Mortgage Bankers Association’s 95th Annual Convention. Early reports from the show indicate that attendance is down, but that business is proceeding. But not all of the business is being conducted by the lending industry.

Paul Jackson of HousingWire reports that for the first time in the history of the convention, the MBA has earned a contingent of protesters.

For those that are not dodging angry activists (who apparently aren’t even part of a housing-related non-profit) who think that housing is a natural right (right!), there is plenty of excitement at the annual show.  Read the rest of this article and use the poll to let us know if you’re at the show.
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Mortgage Industry Advisory Corporation (MIAC), a leading provider of mortgage pricing, hedging, accounting and risk management solutions to the mortgage industry will host a User Conference in New York on November 17th & 18th, 2008.

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Like all industry shows this spring, attendance was down somewhat from last year at the Title/Appraisal Vendor Management Association’s annual convention here in Orlando. But that didn’t keep the organization from putting on a great show the first day.

The session speakers were very good and I’ve heard numerous comments from attendees indicating that they are taking away real value. Example, Monte Jiran, COO of Equity Settlement Services, a title company, told the audience at the technology panel that it’s not about what software you choose or what vendors supply it, it’s about how the partners you choose to work with work with each other. If they are not willing to “play nice” together for the benefit of his business, he ditches them. That’s a contrast from what we often hear on the origination side of the business, where companies keep looking for an end-to-end solution provided by a single vendor. Lenders still seem to be pretending that they want that kind of a one-to-one relationship, but when vendors offer it, they don’t buy it.

The title agents and appraisers who come to this show to meet with some of the nation’s largest vendor management firms don’t have large technology budgets. They need a lot of support and count on a number of vendors to provide them with a quilt of inter-woven solutions. Jiran told attendees to demand that vendor partners come together on every aspect of the platform to make sure that all works.

We also heard from Jeff Thredgold, economic futurist and publisher of the weekly Tea Leaf, as well as leading appraisers who addressed the many changes coming to that side of the business.

I’m down to the floor now to hear attorney Phil Schulman give his keynote. He’s always informative and entertaining.

In an opening session entitled “The Third Industrial Revolution and its Effect on Commercial and Residential Real Estate,” Jeremy Rifkin, founder and president of The Council on Economic Trends and author of The End of Work, told mortgage bankers attending the MBA’s Technology in Mortgage Banking conference in Dallas earlier this week that global trends indicate that we are on the cusp of revolutionary changes that will have a marked impact on the way we live and work.

Rifkin has spent much of his career analyzing trends in economic data and trying to determine what they will mean to humans in the future. One of his conclusions is that soon we will leave the era of mass wage labor. His conclusion is based on his identification of trends in two industries, communications and energy.

Rifkin says that any time big changes in communication technology coincide with big changes in the availability of energy, you’ll have an industrial revolution. The first one we experienced happened in the early 1800s, another occurred near the beginning of the last century. Soon, says Rifkin, Internet technology will converge with the business of delivering power and we’ll experience a third industrial revolution.

He envisions a world where the need to combat climate change coincides with the drive to find more affordable energy than fossil fuel (he says oil will continue to become more expensive–approaching $200 per barrel in the near future). The result will be green buildings that combine solar, geothermal, ocean waves or river current, biomass and wind technologies to produce more energy than they need. Excess energy will be stored using Hydrogen-based fuel-cell technologies or sold back to the energy supplier.

For their part, suppliers will used lessons learned from the World Wide Web to create wide area power transmission networks that will essentially make power a cheap commodity. He mentioned four Southwestern energy companies that are already working on this.

Update: Here is a story about one company apparently moving in this direction.

Building out this infrastructure will be expensive and will constitute the last gasp for the wage slave economy. After that, things will change.

“Every building will become a power plant,” he told the audience. “Buildings will go up where renewable energy is plentiful. We’ll all be generating power like we generate information today.”

He’s very passionate about his message and I look forward to reading more of his ideas, but judging by the looks on the faces of some in his audience, I think many were asking themselves one important question: who will finance these buildings and where will those lenders find liquidity?

Considering the rise in investment from Sovereign Wealth Funds and the new proficiencies on the part of middle eastern countries for building new cities, if we’re not careful we’ll be the wage slaves swinging the hammers and someone else will end up owning the world when the dust clears from Rifkin’s third industrial revolution.