“Rob, what happened with the DSCR appraisal issue in Baltimore earlier this year?” Good question. Baltimore is not alone: This week we have investors either pricing themselves out of, or ceasing loans from, the Philly market for certain non-owner loans.) The whole Baltimore thing seems to have quieted down, and up until recently the last news came in October although this week along came, “ Baltimore is striking fear into private lenders across the country.” “Over the past t

“With all this craziness, you’d think the United States was cursed. Like it was built on an Indian burial ground. Oh, wait…” Roughly 2.6 million people die in the United States every year. (This shot up well above 3 million in 2020 and 2021, despite those who say COVID didn’t or doesn’t exist.) Our birth rate has been going down for many years, with its own set of issues. Lenders are on the front line of these trends and usually shift their product lines to accommodate chan

In an industry accustomed to turbulence, the current mortgage environment presents a peculiar contradiction. Lenders and capital markets teams express an uneasy confidence, aware that even a sure thing in today’s environment can shift overnight. The result is a paradoxical moment in which everyone knows what might happen, yet few genuinely trust it. I'm focused on staying optimally hedged and hoping only for calm. Movement up or down matters less than avoiding volatility. Thi

Somewhere, in a parallel universe, Mariah Carey is walking around some supermarket, sick of listening to me sing Christmas carols. This is, of course, a humorous assumption, but what isn’t so humorous is the discussion begun by the Trump Administration about assumable mortgages, arguably the bane of MBS investors. Locked-in mortgage rates and frozen inventory have pushed an old idea back into the spotlight: the assumable mortgage, a feature long limited to FHA and VA loans bu