Experience Ego Ergo- Mortgage Real Estate Marketing Technology Opinion

Once upon a time there were some pretty reliable indicators when it came to forecasting the near future trends of mortgage rates.  Non-farm payroll, unemployment, housing starts, the Consumer Price Index and other such macro view reports we’re accurate arrows in a mortgage professionals quiver when it came to ‘predicting’ mortgage rate movements.  Stocks, their [...]

I’ve been writing a bit over at Housingwatch about the recent news surrounding reasons behind housing market crash, viewed through the 20/20 lenses we all posses.  The good folks at AOL like to keep posts around 500 words to keep things tight and to the point.  So, I’ll bring some of the words I couldn’t [...]

Pull the veil back around performance related metrics relative to market baselines for practicing real estate agents. Establish a Bar, establish accountability, demand greater transparency and Raise The Bar along the way.

The Fed will stop buying mortgages beginning at end of March 2010.
Uh-oh.  This is kind of a big deal.
Lets reflect back for a minute…
Back in September 2008 the bottom fell out of the mortgage and housing industry, the pillar of our economy at the time, as the MBS market was more or less exposed as [...]

Who is to blame for the housing and mortgage markets undoing depends on who you ask. Consumers blame everyone, brokers blame banks, banks blame brokers, appraisers are in the cross-hairs, even real estate professionals are not immune to the finger pointing…I think Michael Jackson had something to do with it all, but I can’t prove [...]

Comparing real estate to companies from very different industries (like Apple) when referencing how branding or marketing should be done is very en vogue and very misdirected.  Highly successful ‘Big Brands’ are created in tightly controlled environments that have been developed over many years and are almost always backed by superior products or services.
The industry [...]

The following post is simply one non-conformists opinion, albeit a relatively educated one…Its my hope that my words, cutting as they may come across, cause an epiphany for more than a few…
This entire post is based on The California Association of Realtors 2008 Home Seller Survey (released in July 2008, I just happened upon the [...]

Pending Death and Future Living.  Transparency, Technology, Social Media, Business Strategy, With Some Economics Sprinkled On Top
And…I’m back, with my longest title and quite a rambling, yet thoughtful post.  Although I could have posted here and there, I just haven’t been compelled to do so.  When the itch would hit, I’d often read well articulated [...]

Risk-Based Pricing (RBP) and Mortgage Rates.
Risk Based Pricing is quite simply, a pretty complex topic…so over a series of posts (I was going to throw up one long post but could hear heads hitting keyboards after trying to read the first 5 pages) I’m going to break down how each of these general factors and [...]

Zillow, Trulia, Google, Yahoo, and a slew of other real estate listing (and other) information providers out there demonstrate the want/need for alternative ways to locate and act on property listings instead of using a traditional Realtor and their antiquated methods. The genesis can be traced back to Google’s opening of their mapping API, catalyzing [...]

How come you can call 5 different brokers/bankers on the same day, with the same information, and receive 5 completely different quotes? Good question. All brokers/bankers have access to the same rates and programs; the 5 different quotes represent 5 different cost estimates to obtain the exact same mortgage. The main variable being the [...]