TNR - April 2011

Issue 045 April 2011 TheNicheReport.com

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Times 10 Turbulent 20The Foreclosure 2007 to 2011

FEATURE ARTICLE!

Margaritas & mayhem.

Crisis Causes & consequences.

28 New York CEMAs

What are they and how do they save money?

Up 58 Bringing The Rear Ex-Assistant Treasury Secretary Herb Allison and HAMP.

Checked Your Trash Lately?

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Do the math: The URAR form alone has over 1000 fields. Even at 98% field-level accuracy, 20 or more fields will be corrupted. Some of those will be critical, and so your pipeline will stop due to bad data. You might not notice it today, because PDF extracted appraisals aren’t subjected to rigorous data analysis. But they will be, and many won’t pass.

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CONTENTS

Issue 045

20

April 2011

The Foreclosure Crisis Causes & Consquences

Peter Hébert

NICHE REPORTS Agency & FHA HARD MONEY & NON-PRIME COMMERCIAL ConStruction JUMBO REVERSE MORTGAGE Service Providers

pg 48 pg 48 pg 49 pg 49 pg 49 pg 49 pg 50

FOUNDER & PRESIDENT Robert Pegg robert@thenichereport.com CO-FOUNDER & PRESIDENT David Pegg david@thenichereport.com MANAGING EDITOR Stewart Mednick stewart@thenichereport.com

10 28 30 32 35 6

Turbulent Times 2007 to 2011

42

Justine Assal Owner, acm financial Margaritas & mayhem.

The Niche Report The Niche Report talks with Lisa Schreiber, Executive Vice President of Wholesale Lending.

New York CEMAs Richard Pisnoy Silver Fin Capital Group LLC What are they and how do they save money?

Center Stage with TMS Funding

DEPARTMENTS

EDITORIAL / CONTENT MANAGER Kristen Moser kristen@thenichereport.com ACCOUNTING MANAGER Shawna Ingram shawna@thenichereport.com Advertising Director Jessica Grizzle Jessica@thenichereport.com Advertising sales Heather Bopp Heather@thenichereport.com

09

note from the founder

Production Manager Henry Suchman henry@thenichereport.com

Aime Wills independent loan processor

37

man on the hill

Production Assistant Dawn Exner dawn@thenichereport.com

Creating a Commission Free Sales Force

39

APPRAISER sound off

Cartoonist Martin Bradford

44

TIP OF THE MONth

46

What's your mortgage IQ?

53

LENDER & RESOURCE DIRECTORY

58

BRINGING UP THE REAR

Do You Have the Lending Yips?

Tim Davis Mortgage Marketing and Sales Coach Go from generating leads to receiving referrals.

What Price Education?

BJ BOUNDS Sr. Marketing Communications Specialist, Calyx Software April 2011

COLUMNISTS & Contributing Authors Martin Andelman Justine Assal Lamarr Banks BJ Bounds Tim Davis Karen Deis Peter Hébert Stewart Mednick Richard Pisnoy Marc Savitt Aime Wills

It takes 5 seconds of your time to have us donate on YOUR behalf.

Published monthly by BODA Publishing, LLC PO Box 494, Bentonville, AR 72712 Phone: 866.964.2695 Fax: 703.991.2362 Email: info@thenichereport.com www.TheNicheReport.com

SUBSCRIPTIONS

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ADVERTISEMENTS

Like our Facebook page and help us get to 8500 “Likes” and we will donate $1,000 to National Association of Independent Housing Professionals lawsuit on YOUR behalf, our facebook followers.

The sooner we get to 8500 “Likes” the sooner we will send a check to NAIHP on your behalf for $1,000.00.

Go ahead and

us on Facebook!

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The Niche Report

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EDITORIALS / ARTICLES To submit an article for consideration in The Niche Report, please send an email to stewart@thenichereport.com or call 866.964.2695. We are interested in original writings relevant to mortgage brokers and other real estate finance professionals.

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Note from the founder

By the time you read this the deadline for the Federal Reserve’s loan officer compensation rule will have been enacted (April 1st). The NAIHP and NAMB have both filed lawsuits in order to try and put a halt to this over zealous rule that would ultimately force many originators to leave the business. Why? Who wants to work five times harder for the same pay? You might as well order up your mortgage at the nearest DMV. Yep, let’s think about that for a minute.

Almost as soon as the lawsuits from NAIHP and NAMB were filed, the Fed requested that they be combined into one. Which leads me to my next point – Why isn’t NAIHP and NAMB working together on this and pooling together their resources? It seems obvious to me that they would serve our community much better united than divided.

Any hoo, I would like to invite our readers to join us on Facebook and “Like” our page. We have made a commitment to donate $1,000 to the NAIHP legal fund to help support their lawsuit on your behalf once we receive 8500 “likes” to our Facebook page - http://www.facebook.com/TheNicheReport. We’ve decided to help Marc Savitt and NAIHP for a couple of reasons (beyond the obvious fact that we are association members). One, he is a pitbull with ferocious tenacity and he loves this industry for the right reasons. Two, NAIHP filed first. Three, Marc is not afraid to address any misconceptions or questions regarding who he is and what NAIHP stands for. And finally, to be quite frank, NAMB has never come to us and asked for support. I’m not even sure who to talk to over there. Don’t read into that last statement too much. I like NAMB and I think they serve a purpose, it’s just that I get a feeling they don’t want our help – so be it, that is fine and dandy, no sweat off my back.

With that said - get on Facebook and HELP US HELP YOU! Once our goal is met, $1000 will go towards your cause on your behalf.

With every issue that goes out each month, I get that prideful feeling that each issue is better than the last. This issue is no exception. Along with the usual suspects, we have Peter Hebert with his take on the Foreclosure Crisis. Let me warn you, Peter is one of those industry scholars who performs his due diligence before he tackles a subject. It is a great read and your brain will grow by ten percent.

I would also like to introduce to you our new Cartoonist – Martin Bradford. A while back we asked for help (you would know if you had followed us on Facebook!) in finding someone who could provide a political/satirical cartoon to our magazine and website. We had about a dozen submissions and after sifting through them all, Martin clearly popped out as the most talented. Martin is a soft spoken, mild mannered, retired school teacher who lives in Oklahoma. Please welcome Martin to The Niche Report and enjoy his monthly cartoons that will be proudly displayed within the pages of each magazine (pg 26 this issue).

Keep up the fight!

Robert Pegg Co-Founder & President

Official

MEMBER

TheNicheReport.com

9

Turbulent Times 2007 to 2011 Margaritas and Mayhem by justine assal

S

itting on a beach on the West coast of Mexico in July 2007 on a family vacation, came a fateful phone call from the office. It was different from the other four calls I had received from them describing what amounts to normal issues in the daily life of a mortgage company. This one had an ominous feel and had certainly sent a chill through our organization. It was driven home further as I sat in the hotel lobby talking to our office manager and saw the trailers on the CNN screen describing the same news as my phone call.

One of our wholesale banks processing the majority of our pipeline had closed their doors and was not even honoring approved commitments. It was unprecedented and in hindsight, the beginning of a long and arduous journey that we are all still taking. Although we realized the gravity of the situation, there was no way to fully comprehend what we were about to embark on and the near collapse of our industry, our finances, our businesses, our livelihood!

Life is always about perspective and although our journey is never finished, this period of three years will be etched in many minds forever as a turning point! In many ways, it has had the intended effect of industry reform and economic responsibility but no changes in life are ever easy and this one has been so far reaching that it has resulted in many of us buying stock in hair color to keep gray hair at bay.

10

April 2011

Mine Fields As I returned to work from my vacation, ever the optimist, I kept assuring everybody that it was going to be fine and that we simply needed to find a new lender to take the files. National news was reporting the fall of the banking and mortgage industry with a lust that is reserved only for events of National and International catastrophic proportions. In the bubble of our office, we had the ability and need to deal with the sheer enormity of the situation by filtration and avoidance. We had files to close and that is where our attention stayed focused; banks and lenders were falling almost daily. We had to navigate the mine fields and try to keep them safe. Thus started the beginning of our new obsessive compulsion – Implodometer! We logged on daily to see who was on the ailing list so that we could avoid sending our loans into a black hole. We rushed to close loans before the program slipped through our hands into a piece of history. It was much like trying to fill a bucket with dry sand with only your bare hands as tools.

We still stayed positive, probably more out of denial than fact or reality.

The Age of Denial Thankfully, we as humans, have the innate ability to focus only on the facts that support what we choose to believe. We continued to work on the remnants of a once beautiful and abundant pipeline of loans. By now, they were beaten and battered with many casualties along the way. Our pipeline had come under attack and we were now

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