Rick Kellow's (dad4_2) Blog

The pain that homeowners and homebuilders are feeling now is a sign that things are going to get better.  The news that housing starts have fallen to their lowest level in 17 years sounds like one more reason to be depressed                                          about the shrinking value of yo...

As a loan officer, you are in business for yourself, and one of the "rules" of business that we all have been told is that the customer is always right. The customer is king. No wait, cash is king, but without the customer, there is no cash. So I ask you, what do you think? Is the customer always...

  1)  You need a database to keep track of your sphere of influence. Your sphere is everyone that you know including your friends, family, prospects, and past clients. And the best way to keep track of all these people is to put them into a database to keep track of all our info. We try to captur...

Is the glass half full or half empty? It is all in your perspective... in these difficult times for the mortgage professionals and realtors... it is more important than ever to remain professional and positive... this includes all the things we say, email, fax etc... It also means we should netw...

The media has currently jumped on the recession bandwagon. They are deluging us with gloom and doom about real estate, credit markets, our investments, the economy. The sky is falling, the sky is falling! Now, the easy thing to do as you make the rounds is to join in on all the wailing and whinin...

How much does attitude matter? We are working a very motivated realtor the continually refers to our joint customers as fools, jerks, twits, losers, etc... Even goes so far to put this in writing in emails... I am really having a hard time with this... I don't like the attitude... I do like the b...

As mortgage brokers we are always in jeopardy of losing our customers to the lenders we work with.We deal with our clients for a short amount of time, but the lender is in constant communication with them for years. And whenever your customers are asked who their mortgage company is, they will us...

In the past few days, weeks and months have been rather wild in the mortgages industry. What with rates changing companies leaving the business, values changing of homes dropping, and program matrixes being completely rewritten... I have been consuming more than my share of Tums... so as general...

Recently I have had several customers ask... what are points? I thought this was common knowledge... but here goes...Points are interest paid in advance to reduce the rate on a loan. One point is equal to 1% of the mortgage amount. The general rule is that 1 point is worth 1/8 of 1% off the loan ...

  1)Prohibiting lenders from issuing loans that borrowers cannot repay. Much of the mortgage crisis was pegged to borrowers that took out loans with low initial rates that reset to much higher rates down the road. Many homeowners could not afford the higher rates and their loans resulted in forec...