Smart Borrower Blog

Archive for May, 2008

News From The Feeds

Although I get a lot of information for the MM blog from Google, yahoo and Reuters, I also subscribe to several RSS feeds through Google Reader to keep myself inf0ormed.  It just makes good sense if you want to keep up with the market all in one place.  I get a lot of good info […]

PMI Sees Rising Defaults

We all know about private insured mortgages.  You know the ones – people buy into a home and don’t have enough for a down payment, so the mortgage insurance guarantees the bank payment if there is default. Seems that there is also trouble in this market, with Mortgage Insurance Co’s of America reporting 73,880 insured […]

Home Prices Continue To Fall

House prices continue to fall across the nation. Studies by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight show that this has happened in 43 states with California and Nevada taking the biggest hit at more than 8%. Prices sank 3.1% in the first three months of the year. This is on the heels of 13 […]

The Decline of Franklin Bank

No one can really predict the way the mortgage market will go.  Many economists and analysts can crunch numbers and read predications in what the market is up to, but there are just too many factors involved to take a clear cut snapshot of what really goes on. Case in point – Lewis Ranieri, of […]

Mortgage Applications Decline

The market took a real beating this week – according to the Nightly News due to rising oil prices – and we once again see a decline in mortgage applications.  Not surprising here.  Stats show that they fell 7.8% for the week ending May 116th.  The Mortgage Bankers Association’s application index fell to 621.6 from […]

Neighborhood Assistance Corp. of America

I’ve written about contacting your mortgage holder and trying to make arrangements to stop foreclosure on your property.  This is a reasonable idea, and one everyone that is even half way responsible would make.  But how effective is this process?  On the Union Leader of New Hampshire website today was an article about a woman, […]

New Home Construction

We see an upturn in new home construction for the month of April, the first increase in some time.  Reports from the Commerce Department Friday give the figure of housing construction rising by 8.2 percent in April to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.03 million units.  The painful housing slump is far from over, […]

PennyMac

It had to happen – with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae all the news today, we now see a company, Private National Mortgage Acceptance Company, LLC, that is addressing the dislocations in the U.S. mortgage market.  Nicknamed PennyMac, they are investing in and servicing residential mortgage assets on behalf of private investors.  Headed by Stanford […]

Upside Down Homes

An interesting thing is occurring.  Property values are dropping as everyone knows.  What effect does this have on the market?  I did some checking today, and here is what I found. If you bought a home in 2006-2007, the property has decreased in value.  This affects 77% of buyers.  If you bought in 2007, the […]

Jingle Mail

I’m a big fan of The New York Times and LA Times, and read them daily.  Being a freelance writer has the disadvantage of not getting out into the world much, and these fine folk keep me informed, along with Reuters, Google and Yahoo.  I had wrote previously about people walking away from their homes, […]