My name is Mike Mueller. I am a Loan Officer / Mortgage Broker / Mortgage Planner in Concord, California. I have been in the industry for 14 years, I've seen the good times and the bad. I work for Patagonia Finance in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am a residential mortgage broker for all of ...

08/31/2007

Buying a Short Sale

8 Comments

Buying an short sale for either an investment property or a residence can try the patience of all parties involved. We know that here in the Bay Area we are presented with plenty of opportunities. How do you buy a Short Sale? Here's a quick run down of a typical purchase. Step 1: Assemble yo...

08/30/2007

"Which is better Lending Tree or E-loan?"

39 Comments

That's a good question. It's something I have not yet specifically written about. Yet it is something that someone somewhere wondered about. They typed this exact question into Google and searched for it. When the search results came back they saw that I was the second organic listing on the p...

08/28/2007

I'm applying for the Branch Manager Position

25 Comments

Monday I reported about a grass roots P.R. campaign had been zipping around cyberspace in the form of emails sent from Countrywide Loan Officers. "Operation Real Story". They were all cut and pasted, all had the exact same verbiage, just a different loan officer's contact information tacked o...

08/22/2007

I Apologize

34 Comments

Yesterday, in the course of accepting a loan application for a new client and their possible refinance I ran into something I had never personally seen before. In a phone conversation setting up an initial consultation appointment I had started to discus with this new client the various loan opti...

08/21/2007

"... know that I am here, backed by Countrywide"

9 Comments

That's how the email ends. The exact same email I have received over and over again, seemingly written by individual loan officers. In truth, it's a propaganda piece sent out by the corporate office straight to the front lines. The Loan Officers. They are supposed to cut and paste the body of wo...

08/20/2007

The Stockdale Paradox

21 Comments

It just occurred to me as I was doing a very normal thing, that it might not actually be "normal". I have a client that was referred to me by an Agent. We met last week. I took the loan application and promptly went to an Automated Underwriting Engine. This is a lenders computer program that wi...

08/16/2007

Redfin Sweet Digs, The Chron, Bankrate and me

3 Comments

I do a lot of daily reading. Yesterday I was reading the Redfin Blog. In it they referenced an article that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle last Thursday. Mortgage crunch hits Bay Area hard because of jumbo loans The article covered most of the basics, got most of the info correct, and o...

08/15/2007

Nobody Noticed My Post

75 Comments

"...and it was the best one I had written all month!" Do you ever feel like that? Like your highly informative post just didn't catch the attention it should have? You are not alone. We all have posts like that. I had one recently You Only THINK You Were Approved that garnered only 10 commen...

08/10/2007

Mitigate - My Daily PowerWord for today

7 Comments

No really, here's the page: http://www.success.com/newsletters/11499Mitigate is a verb that means "to lessen a bad effect". We hear this word used most often in reference to a lender's Loss Mitigation Department. You can easily guess what they do. They are there to lessen the bad effect of fore...

08/09/2007