Belated Blog

This is long overdue in time, but if there's nothing interesting to say, no loss. I'm on the mailing list of some industry bloggers and every couple of days here comes a new blog, lots of cute stuff and a real waste of time. Almost all the news is national so you already know it, and most of it is bad. Countrywide in trouble and stoutly denying it and along comes B of A with two billion of bail-out money. Even with that the top dog at Countrywide, who has been busily selling his company stock for the past year, says on the public airwaves that the worst is yet to come and the mortgage business is going to lead the national economy into a recession. He could be right, but what is his opinion worth? Why ask a failed leader for advice about anything? Like asking the Hutton girl her opinion on the state of public morality.
Closer to home, one day last week in came an e-mail from one of our "A" lenders, Mortgage Investors Group, advising of their departure from the wholesale mortgage business. They haven't taken any hits, just getting too difficult to sell loans into a shrinking secondary investment pool. The number of lenders still out there is declining and from the remaining we receive regular e-mail notices of program changes and underwriting modifications. The market is tightening in response to substantial potential losses looming in the mortgage backed securities business. Greed is a pervasive thing. Wall Street set the stage, but there were an overwhelming number of applicants for a role in the drama. We will muddle through.
For our bunch of good guys, business has been great. It's been a productive month in Chico and Orland and no end in sight. Prices are still declining though not dramatically, and interest rates are holding fairly steady. We're excited by our continued movement into commercial lending, in fact have a brand new web site which is still kind of a work in progress which you can visit here if you wish. With the tightening of the real estate and lending markets we think (hope) that some of the less than professional agents will have made some career changes and leave a gap that we can fill. We want to make a difference and slowly but surely we'll persuade people that saving money is smart business. Well over 90% of real estate buyers start their search on the internet now, and we're out there. Over 20 national real estate web sites carry our listings and one of our partners is about to put us on three more major, new, sites. It just keeps getting better. Next week I'll summarize the area sales figures for you, but 'til then
As usual
Thanks for visiting