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<\/a><\/p>\nTo Our Clients, Colleagues and Friends,\u00a0<\/p>\n
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- A friend wrote us that there are tons of openings at FDIC.gov.\u00a0 If you\u2019re interested in doing failed bank clean-up work, you should also check out the contractors they use.\u00a0 One of them is Solomon, Edwards (solomonedwards.com), and there are others as well.\u00a0 We hear that it\u2019s much easier to get hired by one of the contractors than by the FDIC.<\/li>\n
- This photo is a fake, but it\u2019s still pretty cool.\u00a0 The setting is under San Francisco \u2019s Golden Gate Bridge .
\n![\"joe1\"](\"http:\/\/mortgagenewsclips.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/12\/joe1_thumb.jpg\")
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- If you\u2019re a Husky, you can be proud that of all the public colleges and universities in the United States , University of Washington alums have been awarded more Congressional Medals of Honor than any other school.\u00a0\u00a0 And next to Cal , their students rank #2 in students who join the Peace Corps. The University of Washington was a pretty good (but not great) University for years, till they made a stunningly brilliant move.\u00a0 Some number of years ago they appointed Bill Gates\u2019 mom to their Board of Trustees, and over the years, tons of Microsoft dollars flowed to the campus.\u00a0 It\u2019s now gone from pretty good to very, very good.\u00a0 Their medical school is considered one of the ten best in the nation.<\/li>\n
- Remember our mentioning Tightwad Bank as being in the Hall of Fame of Great Bank Names?\u00a0 Well, there really is such a bank (www.tightwadbank.net<\/a>), and, no surprise, it\u2019s located in Tightwad, Missouri . The town has a population of 66 people. And one bank.<\/li>\n
- What is a Brooks Machine? From a friend at the BofA:\u00a0 \u201cI hate to admit it, but I know what a Brooks machine is. It’s a machine that would print out TIL information. I remember loans like GPM’s and the tapes the machines generated to show the loan payment stream. Those tapes were a mile long.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Debbie Lane from Monarch Mortgage in Virginia Beach wrote about the machine and its inventor and several others also wrote in with similar comments.<\/li>\n
- The comment from our friend refers above to GPM\u2019s.\u00a0 If you never heard of them, they were Graduated Payment Mortgages. We used to like calling them gyp \u2018ems<\/em>. And speaking of giving names to loans or securities, when the 30 year Treasury bond was at 10%, we used to refer to them as Bo\u2019s, as in Bo Derrick.\u00a0 Actually, you might have been in middle school then, but 25-30 years ago Bo Derrick was the drop-dead beautiful star of a movie called, simply, \u201c10\u2019, as in \u2018\u201dOn a scale of one to ten, she\u2019s a ten.\u201d\u00a0 We all called a 10% bond a Bo, and we all thought we were terribly sophisticated and wildly clever.<\/li>\n
- We got an e-mail from Jeff McCalmon, one of the owners of Tightwad Bank telling us \u201cWe do enjoy the amusement of the name.\u201d\u00a0<\/li>\n
- We\u2019re always hammering on clients to calculate their exact cost-to-originate every month, and not estimates (\u201cIt costs us about $1,200 to originate a loan\u201d is not good enough). You need to know it precisely, and in bps.\u00a0 You need to be able to say \u201cOur cost-to-originate was 127 bps last month, it\u2019s 117 bps year-to-date, and it\u2019s 113 bps year-to-date in our Manchester office and 142 bps in our Concord office.\u201d<\/li>\n
- You need just as much specificity in calculating your gain on sale.\u00a0 You need to be able to say that \u201cOur gain-on-sale was 155 bps last month and 147 year to date v. 163 for all of last year.\u00a0 So far this year it\u2019s running 132 with conventionals, 188 with FHA, 193 for VA, and 201 for USDA.\u00a0 Our loan officer, John Galt, is our highest producer by volume this year, but the gain-on-sale on his loans has only been 83 bps, and the 2nd<\/sup> highest producer by volume, Hank Reardon, has been averaging a gain-on-sale of 153 bps.\u201d\u00a0 Get the picture?
\nIf you can\u2019t spit out numbers like this, you\u2019re not managing your business in a way that lets you make the best decisions. And the crazy thing is that all this data is in your system somewhere.\u00a0 It\u2019s just a matter of extracting it and presenting it.\u00a0 We were at Monarch Bank subsidiary Monarch Mortgage, and they have all this!\u00a0 They really have their numbers down. It wasn\u2019t a surprise that they are also highly profitable, and it\u2019s always that way.\u00a0 The companies that know the metrics of their business best are the ones that are the most profitable.\u00a0 And vice versa.<\/li>\n- And how about that Bernie Madoff?\u00a0 Only 148 years and five months left on his sentence.<\/li>\n
- Here\u2019s from someone we did a FOCIS-plus<\/em> for, after she started tracking these metrics as we suggested:\u00a0 \u201cWe\u2019re tracking the things you told us to track, and we\u2019ve found that some of our highest producers are our worst performers for profitability and loan quality\u2026\u201d<\/li>\n
- Do first impressions really matter when important guests visit your office?\u00a0 We say they do and former warehouse lender Bob Murray agrees, providing this mental checklist: “What does the office look like?\u00a0 Is it spartan or decked out in all cherry wood paneling?\u00a0 Is the office clean and orderly, or is paper piled everywhere?\u00a0 Is the overall environment (the facility, staff, and tone) professional and understated or over the top?\u00a0 Good companies are busy but organized and they keep overhead down…. While these are only initial impressions, they often prove to be indicative of how owners\/managers run the business.”<\/li>\n
- We still think you\u2019d really enjoy Brothers<\/em>. Toby McGuire was excellent, as was Natalie Portman.\u00a0 By the way, the Harvard educated Portman has a very interesting YouTube video at http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=v8e6-IeQ0aw<\/a>.\u00a0 If you\u2019re easily offended by a bit of foul language, do not watch this!\u00a0 But if you can handle it, it\u2019s pretty hilarious given her squeaky clean, Ivy-educated image.<\/li>\n
- We wrote about the Schwab Bank portfolio of HELLOCS, and we got the following from a Schwab official. \u201cI believe that in our case a much better measurement in terms of understanding both the concentration of risk and our basic approach to bank lending is to look at HELOCs as a percentage of total bank assets, not as a percentage of our loan book.\u00a0 Our client loan book is small relative to assets.\u00a0 Bank assets here tend to be concentrated more in securities, particularly government backed\u2026.. In addition, there is a high concentration among Schwab Bank clientele of Schwab brokerage clients, hence our high average FICO scores, and low default rates.\u201d\u00a0 That makes us feel lot better as we\u2019ve always thought of Schwab as a really well run company.<\/li>\n
- We were wrong.\u00a0 Indy Mac was not seized on a Thursday, but apparently Wamu was.\u00a0 Someone wrote us that it was on July 11 that Indy Mac was closed, and isn\u2019t 7-11 supposed to be a lucky<\/em> number?<\/li>\n
- It looks like BAC sent loans to Freddie with a Bailee letter stating that the funds were to be wired to BAC as collateral agent, with Freddie ignoring it and wiring them to Taylor Bean’s account at Colonial. BAC is now being sued by the warehouse lenders.\u00a0<\/li>\n
- Possible the best mortgage newsletter is written by Rob Chrisman, and he reported recently mortgage brokers are originating less than 13% of residential loans.\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 Remember when it was running at 60%?\u00a0 Most of our wholesale clients have spent the last year or two moving into retail, but interesting, we also have some who don\u2019t feel the need to move big time into retail.\u00a0 We think there were always be wholesale, and we admire those mortgage bankers who are committed to staying in wholesale and seeing that it works.<\/li>\n
- Sport Quote of the week, from Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal<\/em>:\u00a0 \u201cSoccer is a gentlemen\u2019s game played by hooligans. Rugby is a hooligan\u2019s game played by gentlemen.\u201d\u00a0 Don\u2019t you wish you\u2019d come up with that line?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
With so many of us sending our kids off to college, it\u2019s only normal to think about what we owe children for these first 18 years or so.\u00a0 It seems that we owe them love, a set of good values, a safe environment, and an education. Can you think of anything else?<\/p>\n
Garrett, Watts & Co.<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Today’s special: The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Mortgage Bankers!<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n
Helping mortgage lenders increase revenues, control costs, and better manage risk.<\/em><\/p>\n
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- Mike McAuley\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (MMcauley@GarrettWatts.com<\/a>)<\/em><\/li>\n
- Corky Watts\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (CWatts@GarrettWatts.com<\/a>)<\/li>\n
- Joe Garrett\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (JGarrett@GarrettWatts.com<\/a>)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 To Our Clients, Colleagues and Friends,\u00a0 A friend wrote us that there are tons of openings at FDIC.gov.\u00a0 If you\u2019re interested in doing failed bank clean-up work, you should also check out the contractors they use.\u00a0 One of them is Solomon, Edwards (solomonedwards.com), and there are others as well.\u00a0 We hear that it\u2019s much […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81879","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81879","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81879\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
- Corky Watts\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (CWatts@GarrettWatts.com<\/a>)<\/li>\n