Posts Tagged ‘mortgage brokers’
On the rise and fall of mortgage brokers
I talked with NPR’s Marketplace Money recently about mortgage brokers’ creative efforts to stay alive in an increasingly hostile environment — give it a listen. Brokers now sell just one in six mortgages, down from four in five just a couple of years ago, as lenders and mortgage insurers put strict (by 2000s standards, anyway) limits on the terms of loans brokers can sell, and many banks shut have simply down their divisions that rely on mortgage brokers to deliver the goods.
You can also hear me on KNPR, in Las Vegas, explaining (along with the Wall Street Journal’s Michael Corkery) the pitfalls and potential of the Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable plan, better known as the homeowner bailout. Scroll past the “Metro Prostitution Crackdown” discussion. Apparently what happens in Vegas no longer stays in Vegas, at least not if you’re the one getting paid.
More (from me) on the homeowner bailout
I just wrote a story for Salon about California’s booming loan modification industry — a cadre of mortgage brokers, many of whom sold toxic mortgages during the boom, now reinventing themselves as mortgage bailout heroes, helping homeowners avoid foreclosure. The new Obama administration loan modification program helps guarantee them a steady stream of business, since there’s nothing in Treasury’s new “Homeowner Affordability and Sustainability Plan” to preclude borrowers from turning to one of these companies to help process the deal.
And who the heck came up with “Homeowner Affordability and Sustainability Plan”? It’s not even grammatically correct. Is Treasury promising to make homeowners affordable and sustainable? If I write a check for $10,000 will a homeowner (current? former?) show up on my doorstep?
How the homes we live in turned into the monsters that ate our economy and the United States became a nation obsessed with real estate.
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