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What’s the Difference Between a Licensed Originator & A Registered Originator?

Did you know that there is a big difference between a licensed mortgage loan originator and a registered loan officer at a bank?

And why would you care?

Licensed Mortgage Loan Originator –
• 20 hours of training courses
• Pass National Licensing Test
• Pass State Licensing Test
• Criminal Background check
• Fingerprinted
• Credit report analyzed annually
• Listed on a national website for consumers to check status

Registered Mortgage Loan Originator (bank employee)
• Routine background check—but by the bank they work for
• Listed on a national website for consumers to check status

Please check out my credentials at www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org, then enter my license number 189464. If you have talked with other loan officers (which I encourage you to do) please ask for their license number and check them out as well.

And if they don’t have one? Well…if I were you, I’d think twice!

Housing’s New Year’s Resolution: Let Old Markets be Forgot!
by Matthew Ferrara on January 2, 2011 Each year we ring in the future by asking “should auld acquaintances be forgot?” Let’s make 2011 the year we forgot about the housing market boom. And got on with selling the market as it exists today.
It’s time we stopped pining for the past. It’s time for sellers, agents, brokers and media pundits to stop talking about the housing boom. It’s time to move on.

We’re entering a new decade.

Shouldn’t we stop using the housing boom as a reference point?

We’ve wasted enough time and energy crying over spilt milk. We’ve sabotaged our ability to understand and act upon the way it is today (think: billions wasted on first-time buyer tax credits). We cannot navigate the current housing market – let alone solve its challenges – by constantly reminding ourselves of the trauma of the bust with every chart, graph and report.

Let auld markets be forgot!

In the new decade, we should prohibit any National Association of REALTORS’ statement from referencing the irrationally exuberant levels of the boom. Case-Shiller charts should have their starting points fixed to no more than two years ago. No government report should mention the years Fannie and Freddie distorted the markets. Any talk about pricing, inventory, volume, sales, and industry growth relative to how it was more than five years ago is utterly meaningless anyway.

Those conditions don’t exist any more.

Enough with the “coulda-woulda-shoulda” that only perpetuates feelings of helplessness, regret, loss and failure. Worse, this past-focus perpetuates present mistakes. Thus, sellers misprice homes seeking what they paid in the past. Agents perpetuate activities suited to consumers of yesteryear (think: newspaper ads, postcards). Brokers “fall back” upon growth strategies that were used in the 1980s (think: recruiting).

None of this is healthy.

Imagine a stock broker who, on the first trading day in 2011, tried to sell some Fannie Mae stock for $56 a share. Absurd, you say? Yet in January 2007, that’s what a share of America’s lending loan-shark was worth. Somehow we understand the “current market” for stocks, regardless of past performance. Why is it so hard to think like that when it comes to our homes?

That’s why we should make 2011 the year we forget about the boom.

Chock it up as a great time we had, but it’s never coming back. No use dwelling upon it. There may be other booms, there might not. But there certainly is a market today, and plenty of sales to be made. Only those who purge their minds, charts, conversations and business plans of the past will be able to create the successful outcomes they desire in the present. That goes for everyone: consumers, agents and brokers and government policymakers.

So in answer to the old song: Yes, indeed! Let auld times be forgot

I get lots of questions about the “source of down payment, closing costs and cash reserves” and I’m sure you do to. Call me for a Mortgage Talking Points ™ flyer, “Show Me the Money: OK Sources of Funds”. Call if your client is selling an asset (like a car) because a paper trail of the documents is critical when it goes to underwriting.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid95659189001?bclid=636473733001&bctid=73675070001

Sex, Lies and Real Estate
● Posted by Matthew Ferrara on October 22, 2010 Start buying all the real estate in sight – before your money won’t be able to buy any real estate for years to come.
Ok, we’ll admit that the “sex” part of our title was just to get your attention. But give us five minutes and it might be worth it.

Because real estate is about to become the best investment for the next decade, maybe more.

Why? Because the government is about to compound two lies that will otherwise undermine the middle class – and the lower classes hoping to become middle class – for a good long time. Those lies are:

1.We’re (almost) suffering from deflation. It’s simply not true. This tall tale is the product of voodoo economics (remember that?) which allows the government to say inflation is low – and falling – by calculating the aggregate inflation rate of a bunch of goods that almost nobody buys at the same time. The Consumer Price Index taken as a whole is meaningless; it’s only when you look at the individual parts that the prices have any meaning: Except that the government usually “subtracts out” the cost trends of food and energy when it reports that prices are “falling” – ie., deflation. Ask anybody who buys milk, electricity or gasoline if he thinks he’s suffering from deflation.
2.A little inflation is good for the economy. Absolutely wrong. Inflation is bad. Period. It destroys the value of money that’s being saved, making those savings worth less (literally) toward investment in job and wealth producing activities. Put it more simply: Find anyone who lived through the 1970s and early 1980s and ask them what they think about inflation. Yet the Federal Reserve Chairman actually things we need to “add” some inflation to the economy. In other words, he thinks we can get out of a recession by forcing everyone to pay more for goods and services. This is the strategy? The Federal Reserve system was invented in 1913 to protect the purchasing power and stability of the currency, not deliberately undermine it. Of course, the Fed Chairman is only calling for a “little” inflation – 2 % – but that’s actually 22% compounded over the next decade, as Henry Kaufman points out in the Wall Street Journal.
Which brings us to real estate.

The commodities market is already signalling worries about the future value of money. Gold’s recent run up is only one indicator. Meanwhile, consumers who have done the hard word of deleveraging their cash flow in the last three years can’t expect to hold onto that money, because the Fed plans to make 1 in 5 dollars evaporate all by itself. So corporate and consumer money that’s been sitting on the sidelines needs to get to work – today – and that means looking for investments that can actually benefit from future potential inflation.

And that means real estate.

For simple buy-low, sell-high, there’s never been a better point in American history to buy real estate (ok, maybe the purchase of Manhattan for a few pearls, but you get the point). Buying low today offers the chance to sell it high when the next bubble – a printed-money inflation one, not a credit-lending one – inevitably forms. Then there’s rental property: Rental income rises with inflation, another way to help today’s money keep pace with increasing inflation cost curves. Even if you’re not inclined to manage property directly, real estate investment trusts (REITs) offer an arms-length play in the rental income space, especially commercial leasing. Somebody is going to have to lease supermarket space to store bread for the future breadlines, right?

Milton Friedman once said that if the government were put in charge of the desert, within a few short years there’d be a shortage of sand. The government is in charge of the money supply and inflation rate. The shortage it will cause by creating more sand – printing more dollars – will be it’s purchasing power.

Even marginal future gains in real estate is better than letting 1 in 5 of your dollars evaporate in the bank. Inflation is just another attempt by government to get you to spend, rather than save, your money. A bad, surreptitious stimulus plan. So look again at real estate, before your cash becomes not worth holding. Transform it into an asset with the potential to benefit from the inflation that is not just coming: It’s already here.