“Probability tells you that a toddler has a 50-50 chance of putting their shoes on the correct feet. Parenting tells you otherwise.” Merging or acquiring is a costly exercise and participants hope that the probabilities are high of success. The latest news comes from Tennessee and involves FB Financial is selling its wholesale mortgage channel to Renasant, but that’s not all. FirstBank also signed a nonbinding indication of interest tosell its correspondent mortgage channel to a separate undisclosed company, which will assume all the assets and personnel for that channel if the deal goes through.
Lender products and services
Todd Duncan has announced the theme of Sales Mastery 2019: FIT! FAST! FORWARD! Sales Mastery is the most trusted, high-performance conference worldwide! It equips mortgage, real estate, and financial service professionals with powerful tools, experienced-based insights, and clear strategies to make more money, impact more people, and enjoy a more balanced and rewarding life. This October, join Todd Duncan in San Diego, California to learn how to (1) DISRUPT your market, (2) CREATE relentless demand, (3) EXECUTE modern, relevant, leading-edge strategies. Imagine the feeling in your life closing an additional two to ten transactions a month in only 90 days. Secure your seat for the #1 event in the financial services industry to stay ahead of change by unlocking your potential and disrupting your market. REGISTER TODAY!
Symmetry Lending’s HELOC Product and their commitment to Service, Speed, and Simplicity is the perfect relationship to meet the demands of today’s purchase market. Symmetry understands the value of certainty in the purchase market, and that different investor requirements can create challenges. Use a Symmetry HELOC to stay within agency guidelines!
With only a few overlays, Symmetry follows the credit and income guidelines from your DU/LP approval. Symmetry Lending will also be attending the Regional Conference of MBAs in Atlantic City, NJ on April 10th. Stop by Booth 426 and say hello to your Symmetry Area Manager, Joe Peterson. You can also find your Symmetry Area Manager here.
Your marketing strategy will make or break your business. If you don’t stand out, your company will fade away. To get a leg up, Quicken Loans Mortgage Services (QLMS), will use its expertise to help you make an impact. The lender gives its partner brokers, banks and credit unions FREE marketing materials that have been tried and tested to get the best response rate. Through QLMS’ Marketing Hub, partners can download templates for flyers, emails, direct mail campaigns and social media content. It’s easy for even the smallest broker to add their logo and contact information – then get their message out there. Contact your AE to learn more. If you’re not working with QLMS yet, you can connect through QLmortgageservices.com to learn about how QLMS can help you reach your clients.
Recruiting quality origination talent is time consuming, requiring focus and organization. “Model Match's award-winning Talent Management Suite (TMS) provides an efficient and effective game plan to take your recruitment efforts to the next level. With Market Insights, Model Match takes the guesswork out of sourcing candidates by allowing you to target producers doing the type and amount of business best matched to your organization. Set the criteria and we do the rest. We'll identify and provide you visibility into a complete production report including last fiscal year volume, trailing 12 months, most recent 90 days, unit counts, average loan amounts, product mix and more. Our team will even source all the contact information for you. The TMS will then guide you through each stage of the recruiting process, from sourcing and attracting candidates, to hiring, on-boarding and retention.” Click here to learn more about the value of Model Match.
Looking for non-QM solutions? Check out Plaza Home Mortgage’s new Solutions Non-QM program and new Bank Statement Income Calculation Service, where you can send a quick request from the Plaza website and they'll review and calculate the monthly income for you before you submit your loan. Flexible income documentation (including 12 and 24-month full doc or 12 and 24-month personal or business bank statements), full doc DTIs up to 50%, interest-only options, new lower reserve requirements, expanded eligibility for all doc types, loan amounts from $100,000 to $2.5 million, and easier to use guidelines matrices. For more information, contact hereforyou@plazahomemortgage.com
Do you know where your leads are? HomeScout® does! With powerful lead and conversion technology solutions, HomeScout allows lenders to monitor and support borrower’s online activities throughout the entire home buying process to close more loans. Integrate their technology seamlessly into your existing website with a powerful search widget that gives your customers access to 100% MLS listing data. Combined with an interactive mortgage calculator to compare multiple loan scenarios, this platform brings the home and the loan together in a single user experience. HomeScout’s unique approach to user privacy means your buyer’s personal information won’t be sold off to your competition where they’ll feel like just another cog in the home-buying machine. Learn more about HomeScout’s capabilities HERE or give them a call at 952-831-0623 and never lose another lead or pre-approved buyer to a public search site again.
Last week, XINNIX, The Mortgage Academy, partnered with industry legal expert Mitch Kider for one of the company’s most popular webinars: Transcending the Turbulence: The New Era of Change in the Mortgage Industry. In this webinar, Mitch tackled some of the industry’s toughest topics, including LO compensation, compliance, and mergers and acquisitions. He also answered some great questions from mortgage leaders across the nation. If you missed it, CLICK HERE to receive your complementary recording today!
Tech Survey
STRATMOR Group’s 2019 Technology Insight Study is now officially underway! In its fifth year of gathering data, STRATMOR has streamlined and mobilized the study by creating multiple, single-topic surveys. The first survey can be completed in about five minutes — on your computer or mobile device. And, best of all, lenders who participate will receive the reports for the surveys they complete for free. Lenders, if you complete the surveys for all sections, you’ll have the entire 2019 Technology Insight Study for the investment of your time. You’ll receive all the great data insight (for example, in 2018, 72 percent of lenders surveyed reported offering borrowers the opportunity to upload documents and respond to conditions online). Take the first survey now on mortgage systems and rate the system you are using. For more information on the 2019 Technology Insight Study visit the STRATMOR website.
Amazon, Google, Facebook, Ellie Mae, MERS, or anyone else collecting data can feed it into algorithms. They want to turn your past into your future. Will it work? (Sure, have you clicked on “BBQ recipes” one day and then seen ads for BBQ mail order food the next?) The cost to originate a loan is above $8,600. Will vendors bring it down? Let’s see what some have been up to.
The Mortgage List. Founded by industry veteran, Ginger Bell, The Mortgage List is a simple, one-stop location for those searching for vendors and service providers to the mortgage industry. With the most complete database of providers The Mortgage List offers a free online resource where you can find everything you need to set up, grow, build and manage your mortgage business. At The Mortgage List you can search for vendors, locate training, connect with other professionals and stay up to date with industry insight.
Congrats to Dawn Douglass, who has been named CIO of Volly, which combines SoftVu, LoyaltyExpress, and Lending Manager, where she is responsible for leading product development, technology management and the development of strategic partnership programs.
Ellie Mae announced the release of AllRegs Online, providing a new user experience for the industry’s most recognized single source for regulatory and investor information. The new AllRegs Online offering includes an updated and modernized interface, new features, compatibility with tablets and more all designed to drive efficiencies in the loan production process. Reade the online press release for additional details.
And don’t forget the release of Ellie Mae’s Encompass Digital Lending Platform™ to help lenders of all sizes originate more loans, lower origination costs and shorten the time to close with compliance, efficiency and quality. Key highlights from this update include: Expanded HELOC origination support, enhanced Consumer Connect™ Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) capabilities and Correspondent and Wholesale Lending enhancements.
CoreLogic released an enhanced title and closing solution for lenders, which is incorporated into the industry standard Collateral Management System (CMS). The solution maximizes workflow efficiencies around activities related to procuring title insurance, facilitating fee collaboration and streamlining closing tasks between lenders and all loan associated vendors. Additionally, the Title and Closing Solution within CMS offers a seamless integration into TitlePort— a CoreLogic platform that provides connectivity to settlement agents and title providers, allowing them to digitally accept orders and correspond with lenders via messaging or document transfer in a secure portal. For lenders who are currently part of the Collateral Management System (CMS) family, this solution is integrated into their CMS tool kit.
LBA Ware has announced the completion of a partial integration of its compensation platform CompenSafeTM with SimpleNexus’s enterprise digital mortgage solution. LOs will be able to receive real-time push notifications on calculated loan commissions directly through the SimpleNexus app.
docutech is expanding its scope of support for loans secured by a borrower’s ownership shares and lease in a cooperative unit (“cooperative loans”) to include home equity lines of credit (“HELOCs”) when the cooperative unit is located in New York.
Appraisers and Lenders alike may be holding their collective breath while regulators work toward a decision on whether to increase the appraisal threshold for residential real-estate transactions. Accurate Group recently weighed in on the FIRREA appraisal threshold topic.
Consumer lending platform Blend announced the general availability of its new home equity loan (HELOAN) and home equity line of credit (HELOC) offerings. Already in use by over 20 customers, including U.S. Bank and Mountain America Credit Union, with rising mortgage rates, the new products are particularly timely. Early customers using the new products, which are Blend’s first extension of its core lending platform beyond digital mortgages, have already seen up to 50% reductions in loan cycle times and increases of up to 3X in application pull-through rates.
Capital Markets
Stocks and bonds don’t always move in opposite directions (look at a graph of stocks rallying and rates dropping since 1982) but yesterday investors turned away from U.S. Treasuries and some of the money must have gone into stocks in a “risk-on trade.” It seems that markets were moved by some manufacturing PMI data that created some optimism that the global economy could be at, or near, a cyclical bottom, propelling the 10-year +9 bps to 2.50% as we have seen a marked uptick in volatility in Treasuries over the past couple weeks. We received better than expected PMI data from the UK and China, allowing investors to move their money from U.S. Treasuries into Eurodollars, requiring a higher yield from Treasuries to make them more appetizing. Remember, the 10-year was as low as 2.34% during Thursday’s trading session. If the volatility continues, it will be interesting to see the Fed’s remarks at their next meeting.
Today is a fairly light for news. We have already seen February U.S. durable goods orders (-1.6%, weak). Next up is Redbook Chain Store Sales for the week ending March 30, the March ISM-New York, and Dallas Fed President Kaplan will speak. We begin today with agency MBS prices better by .125 versus last night and the 10-year yielding 2.47%.
Employment
A Mid-Atlantic based independent mortgage banker is looking for a seasoned executive to launch a direct consumer internet channel. The platform company is privately owned, has a long tenured history, highly entrepreneurial, forward thinking and technology focused. “We are looking for a long-term investment to build and scale a call center. Location to be discussed. We are FNMA/FHLMC/GNMA approved and licensed in over 35 states.” Please email your resume in confidence to anixt@robchrisman.com.
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