Have you heard about Sen. Johnny Isakson, a Republican from Georgia (and a former real estate professional) who has introduced legislation that would beef up the tax credit that currently exists for first-time home buyers?  The news just emerged like a baby chick pecking its way out of its shell and the big idea is to nearly double the tax credit for buying a home this year to $15K AND make it available to anyone buying a primary residence, not just first time homebuyers.  Wow.

Why not just make it an even $20K?  And while the US Treasury prints another $2 trillion, why not step it up to $50K?  The intent is to encourage the step-up buyers to enter the marketplace and start buying homes along with the FTHB that have already flooded the open houses and model homes.  Will it work?

Maybe.  It's a pretty simple equation.  Free money + low rates + cheap houses = More sales.  The ultimate variable though is the emotional aspect of buying.  The paranthetical components of the above equation are (confidence) and (motivation).  Can money really move people to buy homes?  Enough of it will.  People spend millions on lottery tickets and humiliate themselves by eating sheep brains on TV all in the name of winning the ultimate prize: cash.  Isn't a home an even better prize?

 I got nothing else!  It's been some time since I've seen Richard Gere win Debra Winger over and prove to Louis Gossett Jr. that he wasn't some sniveling little punk.  It seems to me that finding a a good loan officer is equally as challenging these days.  We're a small company of 6 full-timers in the mortgage industry and for the past 6 months our search for mortgage consultants has been our own version of a Dan Brown novel: A lot of looking but not a ton of finding.

Right off the bat, we haven't advertised or posted a position.  No Craigslist, Monster.com, local paper.  We haven't run a table at the local Bradenton/Sarasota job fair.  But we have had 3 promising prospects walk through our doors and like what they saw.  Business cards, laptops, a plan to conquer the world one loan at a time, a full-doc gleam in their eye.  They were professing their love of Blue Skye Lending and knew that NOW is the time to position yourself as the lending expert in our local market.

And then, they didn't show up for 3 weeks.  Oh, something "more stable" came along.  Come to find out, finding a loan officer and a gentleman/woman is a little tougher than it would seem.  Overcoming the obstacles of offering someone a straight commission position with no guarantee or draw option is quite a task.  And mortgages are just plain tougher to get done these days; you actually have to be a good salesperson and not just an order-taker.

So how are you finding A Few Good Men?  If you have any suggestions, please let me know as we are looking to grow our company in the next 30-90 days.  Appreciate your advice my fellow officer and love lift us up where we belong!

 Seriously, I'm holding out until rates goes to 4%.  The newspaper and media experts all told me it would happen.  Heck, even the US Treasury Department talked about it.

But here we are at 5.75% (in a matter of a few weeks, after being closer to 4.875% for months) and there's a pretty good chance we are headed toward 7%.  Many blogs ago, I predicted we'd hit 5% (rates were about 6.25% at the time) and just this evening a fellow brother in the mortgage industry, KEVIN HANCOCK, commented on my lucky prognosticating and asked where I thought we were heading.  Back to the 4%'s or up, up, and away?  I figured it was worth posting my response to him in a separate blog entry, so here we go.  Crystal ball time.

Will we hit 7%?  There a pretty good chance we will in the next 12 months.  Hopefully my next post will be sooner than that.

 Imagine this.  You've toiled and traveled months, years even, and you feel as if you have come to the end of your rope.  You look to the heavens in outright desperation, and then the clouds part, and it appears.  The Holy Sale.  Angels sing.

It seems like that is the tale of every mortgage consultant these days.  We are working so hard to get things done.  Transactions aren't just a stroll through the countryside, they are brutal journeys through the most treacherous landscape known to man.  Underwriting.

We are now in the world of appraisal reviews, guideline changes, rising credit score requirements, and bailing MI companies.  Depsite best efforts by President Obama, Congress, the Treasury, and the Fed, it's still a small miracle to get a purchase loan closed.  But to solve our lopsided housing supply/demand curve, we need to get more buyers qualified to buy.  To do that, we need to do a couple of things:

1. Confidence.  You can't legislate fear out of people.  We need a concerted effort by lawmakers, the media, and the real estate community to bring back the love for loans.  When we start hearing the word "bottom", we are well on our way.

2. Credit.  A lot of folks are in a serious liquidity crunch.  Just last week, my credit card company cut my limit and raised my rate.  Just plain evil.  With less money, things start getting paid late.  Mortgages stop getting paid.  With the avalanche of short sales, foreclosures, and loan mods, people with great jobs and plenty of assets can't get a loan.  These are the very people we need in the market as buyers.  By year's end, we will see some type of sweeping credit legislation that somehow allows borrowers to wipe the slate clean on late mortgages and accounts with qualifying hardships.  If this happens, we could see sales back in the black.

3. Common Sense.  Right now, lenders are just plain dumb.  If they'd work with people who are late on their mortgages, we'd have less people trying to short sale.  Less people walking away.  This would normalize property values and you wouldn't have a neighborhood of comparable sales that seem to be dropping lower by the nanosecond.  And on the lending side of things, MI companies and lenders are trying to drink sushi through a straw.  Stop this nonsense with declining markets.  If there were any time to take a risk on using a house as collateral to lend, now is the time.  There just isn't much more room on the downside.  Bring back some reasonable guidelines and the sales will follow.

There are no easy answers, but the Knights of the Closing Table could use a little assistance.  I see brighter visions ahead, so let's continue to pursue the Holy Sale!

 OK.  Time to get out the crystal ball.  We've been hovering in the low 6% range with the 30-yr. fixed interest rates (despite what all of the pop-up ads on Internet proclaim) and a few bits of news lead me to believe we may hit 5% by the end of the year.

1.  I see, I see.  I see wheelbarrows full of money being rolled into the farmhouse of Mortgage-Back Securities (MBS).  With the FED stepping in and bailing out, I mean, backing, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, our mortgages have become attractive again and investors are lining up to buy.  Especially China.  More buyers means better rates for us.

2.  I see something else.  I see stocks continuing to tank with bad news in the financial sector (e.g. Lehman, Merrill, the list goes on).  This is good news for bonds and MBS.  Rates MUST go down as a result of this higher demand for a stable investment.

3.  AH!  Another vision.  I see a nailbiter of an election with one of the key issue being our economy.  Both sides have their take on how to get us out of the housing mess, but in the interim, all of the attention on lending solutions will benefit us.

4.  One more scene has appeared through the fog.  I see more legislation coming out that will favor the homebuyer and encourage the purchases of foreclosed homes.  With rates in the 5% range, more people can get into those homes, so we may see (and already do see with the FHA 5/1 ARM) some cheap money available to help us recover from this housing bust.

OK, maybe it's not as mysterious as gazing into a crystal ball, but in the words of The Little Drummer Boy, "Do you see what I see?"

 All signs are pointing to FHA as the savior of this market.  Numbers don't lie.  FHA originations were in the 2-3% range just a year or so ago; now I wouldn't be surprised to find it closer to 20% of the market share.  Amazing loan programs, no minimum credit score (sort of), and 3% down.  It's a sweet deal.  We got our FHA approval about a month ago and I can't tell you how excited we are about their programs.  All but one of them.

FHA Secure.  I'm still trying to figure this one out.  You have a borrower whose ARM loan resets, the payment goes up, and they get crushed trying to keep up.  FHA Secure was orginally established last September to help these folks out and put them in a fixed loan with a lower rate.  In July, FHA updated those guidelines and now you can refi any loan, fixed or adjustable, into an FHA Secure loan.  Makes sense so far.

But what happens when you owe more than the house is worth?  What if you have two mortgages?  Now your work is cut out for you.  What if you're late on your payments?  New guidelines allow lates, allow you to write down or short pay a borrower's current loans. and allow unlimited CLTV's.  But is anyone actually doing these loans?  After calling all of my wholesale AE's, I've only found one lender (Taylor Bean) that is writing FHA Secure loans.  What good is a program if no lenders are on board?  I'm trying to figure this one out, so any input would be appreciated.  For now, I'm getting mixed signals and I'm looking for a better sign!

 I am ashamed.  It has been weeks since last posting and it's amazing how quickly good habits can be obliterated.  A diet can be crushed in one sitting when placed in front of a package of Oreo DoubleStuff cookies.  A hasty trip through a school zone whilst running late for an appointment can mangle a perfect driving record.  A day of flossing missed and suddenly you're in for a couple of root canals.

So here I type in a bed of my own remorse, covered with a blanket of guilt, back propped up against a pillow of missed opportunity.  How do I get out of this mess and back to AR greatness?  One letter at a time.  I peck away at the keyboard.  I start over.  Nothing I can do about the blogs of June and July.  Just keep typing and set some realistic goals moving forward.  3 posts a week.  20 comments a week.

That's the beauty of our business.  You can pick up where you left off.  People are still buying houses and getting mortgages and you and I can be the ones to meet those needs.  It just takes disclipline, motivation, and creativity.  As soon as I click "Post Blog Entry", I'm back.  Determine what it takes for you to get back where you need to be, and soon enough, you'll have Type Yay Personality.

 Face it.  Lint is one of the last things we think about on a daily basis.  You may shove your hand in your jeans pocket and pull out a mysterious wad of mangled paper and fuzz, maybe even wonder if it was an important note that went through the wash, but whether you sock it back in your pocket or toss it, lint just doesn't matter.  It's annoying on black pants or in your navel, but it doesn't hamper your quality of life.  Until the dryer doesn't shut off.

I thought it rather odd that my clothes had been drying for about six hours the other day and after pulling my scorched jeans from the heat, I decided it was worth taking a closer look at the problem.  Turns out, if you don't clean the lint trap on your Maytag, the lint travels up the vent stack and starts to accumulate.  Eventually, this forms a lint clot on the vent grate and it jams the air flow up better than a guy swallowing too big a bite of a porterhouse.  If left on too long, the intense heat can actually cause a fire and do some major damage to your home.

So after playing appliance man, hopping on my roof, and clearing the fuzz clot, I decided to be a little more conscientious about cleaning out the lint trap before I burned my homestead down.  Which made me think: What are the lint traps in my business that I have been neglecting?

Maybe it's the stack of personal, hand-written thank-you notes I've been meaning to get to.  Could be the log-jam of unorganized e-mails collecting in my inbox.  It just might be visiting those realtors' offices that I used to do business with.  I've certainly accumulated a pile of program guideline changes I've been meaning to look over.  Whatever the case may be, the little things add up and start constricting the flow of your business.  They can even potentially cause fires that could've been avoided.

So take a look at things you've been meaning to do in your business today.  And as the zippers and buttons and wet clothes of your work clank around in the dryer of your mind, remember to ask yourself, what's in my lint trap?

 It's over.  The love is gone.  We've drifted apart.  Sure, there was a time when everything seemed wonderful.  How crazy were we having our first lien right away?  Remember when we'd spend the weekends together, you, me, a paintbrush, some power tools?  You gave me worth and value and it felt so good.

I was so giving in the past, in fact, I gave until it hurt.  Our beautiful second lien came along a few years later.  I took you on that amazing 7-day cruise through the Eastern Caribbean.  I put your kids through boarding school.  We put in that pool you always wanted.  I even helped buy the boat of your dreams and the Escalade SUV.  It was so good for so long.

But something changed in the past few years and I feel like we're strangers.  All you want to do is take, take, take and I've got nothing left to give.  I thought you knew me and what I worth, but it turns out I was wrong.  You look at me with regret, contempt, and sadness.  You wonder why you ever got involved with me.  And that hurts.  Irreconcilable differences.

So the paperwork has been started.  My attorney will be contacting you shortly.  The relationship is beyond repair and it's time for both of us to move on.  And in case you wondered, you're the one that's going to leave.  You get the debt, and I get the house.

 It's getting interesting out there.  The foreclosure rate is increasing exponentially and the media is eating it up like a Chinese buffet.  You can't turn on the tube without a well-polished reporter spewing forth another factoid about the topic, and rue the day that an evening news broadcast doesn't mention the floundering housing market.

But is this compounding the problem?  Foreclosure was the dirty word of the lending world just a few years ago.  You had to be on the brink of financial ruin or the victim of a traumatic life change to walk away from your home.  It's getting easier now.  Heck, millions of people are doing it, so why can't I?  It's the lender's fault anyway for sticking people in bad loans to begin with, right?

I remember back in high school (the mid 80's) when my history teacher said that one out of four of us would be divorced in our lifetime.  It was shocking.  Decades before, divorce was an abberation, a social blip.  Now look at the marriage statistics.  Half of everyone joined in holy matrimony end up breaking their vows.  Did our society create this monster by making it more socially acceptable to divorce?  I drive by this little office now and again called ASAP Divorce, and for $199, they can make it happen.

I'm starting to see the same thing in the lending world.  People signed promissory notes; they gave their word that they'd pay back the money they borrowed, and now they're starting to walk away.  And for $995, you can get a company to help you do it.  Yes, there are consequences, but I can repair my credit in 9 easy steps, wash my hands clean of a bad situation, and life will go on.

What will be the lasting effects on our country's financial fiber?  Is the foreclosure boom just beginning?  Does anyone have any answers?  Or are we headed for moreclosures?