Oct. 25, 2007: Mortgage droning: do you own a shredder?

Oct. 25, 2007: Mortgage droning: do you own a shredder? Rob Chrisman

Even my parents own a shredder. (It sits, still wrapped in the box, under their rotary dial telephone that they lease every month from AT&T.) Experts say that estimating how frequently confidential mortgage data is leaked is difficult, because many breaches go unnoticed. For three days in July, however, Bob Segall, a reporter at WTHR-TV in Indianapolis, Indiana, looked into 40 dumpsters behind loan branches and title companies that handle mortgage documents. In 18 of them he discovered sensitive information about various borrowers. “You could see their complete financial lives on paper, dating back 20, 30, 40 years,” he said. Among the finds inside the mortgage files: a letter from one borrower’s counselor saying he was doing well in alcohol rehab.

Who were the top nonconforming lenders for the first half of 2007? There are no surprises: Countrywide, Wells, Citi, Chase, Bank of America, WAMU, Residential Capital, Wachovia, Indymac, and American Home (remember them?).

Is there any good news out there? Apparently not right now.

• Total Existing Home Sales fell 8.0% and are 19% below a year ago. The national median existing-home price for all housing types was $211,700 in September, down 4.2% from September 2006. Total housing inventory inched up 0.4 percent at the end of September to 4.40 million existing homes available for sale, which represents a 10.5-month supply at the current sales pace.
• The price of the average home Centex sold fell 8% from a year ago, and in some locations prices were slashed 15 to 20 percent, executives said.
• Merrill Lynch took an $8.4 billion hit in the third quarter from revaluing bonds backed by mortgages and other write-downs, and recorded a $2.24 billion loss for the quarter compared with a profit of $1.94 billion a year earlier.
• National City said third-quarter earnings fell 80% and recorded a net loss of $152 million in its mortgage banking business in the third quarter.

The market is mixed this morning following yesterday’s improvement. The 10-yr stands at 4.35%, with mortgage prices roughly unchanged from yesterday afternoon but slightly better than yesterday morning. New Home Sales for September comes out this morning, but we’ve already had Durable Goods (-1.7%) and Jobless Claims (-8k to 331k). Home sales in general are suffering amidst much tighter lending standards and as potential buyers continued to be scared off by falling prices.

A farmer was driving along the road with a load of fertilizer.

A little boy, playing in front of his house, saw him and called, “What’ve you got in your truck?”

“Fertilizer,” the farmer replied.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked the little boy.

“Put it on strawberries,” answered the farmer.

“You ought to live here,” the little boy advised him. “We put sugar and cream on ours.”