According to news sources in Denver, where the City Council voted to regulate medical marijuana dispensaries, more applications have been received for licenses for selling pot than there are Starbucks coffee shops in the entire state, 390 versus 208. Fun with numbers…
“God Loves Mortgage Bankers.” Maybe that could be an MBAA bumper sticker at the next convention. Especially smaller mortgage companies, whose owners tend to be optimistic and which is very fortunate. But it seems that there is a disconnect going on in the industry between many smaller companies’ projections for their own volumes and profit margins for 2010, and the industry-wide projections. Every large investor has production projections that range from $1 trillion to about $1.5 trillion for 2010. The MBAA came out yesterday with a projection that residential mortgage originations will drop 40% this year to the lowest level in a decade: $1.28 trillion down from $2.11 trillion in 2009. They expect purchases to rise slightly to $776 billion from $742 billion in 2009 but expect refinances dropping to $502 billion this year from $1.372 trillion last year. Yet many smaller companies are expecting to increase their production: “My company funded 15 loans per month on average, but since then we’ve hired 5 more agents, so we expect to do 25 loans per month…” Let’s keep our fingers crossed!
Maybe they’ll have some help: last week mortgage applications in the U.S. rose 14%, with refinancing up 22% and purchases up .8%. Slightly lower rates last week helped, of course, and apps for refinancing were back up to 71.5% of all applications.
Uh-oh. Let’s hope that you don’t find your company on this list, put out by HUD and consisting of companies that are under investigation for excessive claims. http://portal.hud.gov, click on “Press Room”, “Press Releases” and then “HUD INSPECTOR GENERAL PROBES MORTGAGE COMPANIES WITH SIGNIFICANT CLAIM RATES”.
At least our Treasury Department is making some coin. The department had a $46 billion profit last year – heck, I wish that I get my taxes done as quickly as they calculated that! Of course, you couldn’t lose owning Treasury debt, mortgaged-backed and agency securities.