In February 1976 Maxine Nightingale’s version of “Right Back Where We Started From” hit #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 list… so what’s that have to do with the mortgage industry? Well… other than it being a great song it doesn’t have much to do with this blog or the mortgage industry. However, it seems that our industry is coming along and we’re getting back (kinda) where we started from. The 10-yr is back down below 3% at 2.934%... the lowest it’s been since mid-April. We’re no

In our industry, it’s normal rhetoric to hear phrases like “a $400,000 loan amount”, or “our goal is to fund $350 million this month”, but you don’t normally hear this one… one BILLION dollars. Now that’s a number that grabs a lot of attention. And typically, that would be a number that Timothy Sloan, Wells Fargo President and CEO, would write on a white-board during projected sales meetings. However, that dollar amount just had a much bigger effect on Timothy and his company

In my previous blog post, I discussed how home prices were outpacing the average US wage. A short housing supply and an ever-increasing demand for home purchases seemed to be the catalyst for all this. This week we received more data to confirm this general market trend. Applications for mortgages jumped 4.8 percent last week from the previous week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association's seasonally adjusted report. This happened as interest rates rose again last week

As we head into the last month of the quarter it seems to me that all we’ve heard about in the industry are the rising interest rates, low housing inventory, tax reform, slim margins, blah blah blah… Well, let’s go ahead and add one more negative connotation to the mix as January marks the second consecutive month of declines in new home sales. Great, as if we needed another topic to drone over for the next few months until the weather breaks here on the East Coast. Speaking

The weather in Pittsburgh today is keeping in line with what Punxsutawney Phil predicted last week… 6 more weeks of winter. The icy roads and fear of tunnels make commuting to work in these conditions stressful and time consuming, but are we stuck doing this forever? This article from Bloomberg the other day brings up some interesting points as we rush to grab the next driverless Uber and makes you consider…will location be the most important thing for real estate in the fu

It seems that almost every major industry has been going through a “renaissance” for innovation in technology. With all this fast adaption, is the mortgage industry lagging behind? Well, that’s what most consumers seem to believe. Value Insured conducted a survey amongst modern homebuyers and the results were quite worrisome. 54% of the panel flat out believed the mortgage industry lacked innovation and is virtually the same it was 10 years ago. 64% believe that all mortgage

Photo by QuinceMedia on Pixabay There has been some buzz around the housing industry this past week with several organizations releasing the 2017 year-end housing data and predicting what we can expect in 2018. I won’t bore you with the analytics but to bring you up to speed – home sales (both new & existing) finished at the highest level since 2007 and the trend is expected to continue; rent increased 3% but mortgage application also increased 3% (which could be a telling si

Photo by Piotr Cichosz on Unsplash When a company announces it’s opening a new headquarters, it rarely gets as much attention and anticipation that the eCommerce giant Amazon has gotten. Last September, Amazon invited cities to submit bids to be the location for its second headquarters. A total of 238 bids were submitted and some were pretty interesting too – Tucson, AZ sent a 21-foot cactus to Amazon’s current HQ in Seattle and Stonecrest, GA offered to rename its city to Am