From the category archives:

Credit

How To: Weave Your Way Through Sub-Prime Trouble

by Alex Stenback 10.25.2007

One of our very favorite blogs on the planet is David Smith’s over at the Affordable Housing Institute, who unpacks some of the more complicated topics in real estate and housing finance with a unique and entertaining elegance.  Case in point, his recent writings on subprime.  The whole series is worth a read (and linked [...]

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Consumers, Well Acquainted with Mr. Frying Pan, Rush to Meet Mr. Fire

by Alex Stenback 08.23.2007

If you have any notion that our collective national jones for borrowed money at any cost and nearly any terms will be behind us once the market, the government, et al. deals with the mortgage mess, you might want to re-think things. For instance: You might assume, super-smart blog readers that you are (you are!), [...]

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Quote of the Day: IndyMac CEO Mike Perry

by Alex Stenback 08.02.2007

"…right now, other than the GSEs and Ginnie Mae….the private secondary [mortgage] market is not functioning." The private secondary mortgage market is where nearly every Jumbo, ALT-A, and Sub-Prime loan is sold after it is created (In other words, after you take out a mortgage the bank, lender, or broker then sells it on the [...]

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Banned in Minnesota Today: Trigger Leads

by Alex Stenback 08.01.2007

One of the better pieces of legislation to come out the East side sausage factory this year is a law banning the sale of what are known as "trigger leads" (more on this here, and here.) [The] new law prohibits consumer reporting agencies or any other business entity from selling or exchanging with a third [...]

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The Trigger List

by Alex Stenback 01.30.2007

We’ve covered this before, but wanted to point out a piece from this Sunday’s Strib that shines a little more light on the "Triggers" program.  For those not familiar, the Triggers program is sort of the dirty little secret of the credit repositories (Equifax, Experian, Transunion.)  Here’s how it works:  Any time you apply for [...]

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Back, Sort Of….

by Alex Stenback 09.19.2006

We’ve been away on an extended end-of-season vacation, (in Italy, should readers care about such things) so apologies for the lack of posting lately, and well, the whole summer.  As we swing into fall you’ll be seeing more and more of the old behind the mortgage, but in the meantime, hold yourselves over with a [...]

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What’s Worse Than Mortgage Spam? Selling Private Data to Random Lenders

by Alex Stenback 04.12.2006

Anyone who likes unsolicited calls from mortgage lenders, raise your hands. Don’t see any hands.  We’re not surprised. But what might surprise you is that anytime you make an inquiry about a mortgage, and a credit report is pulled, information in that report may immediately be sold by the credit bureaus to other lenders, who [...]

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Identity Theft Letters: Phishing for Business or Customer Notification?

by Alex Stenback 12.23.2005

Over at The Consumerist (Gawker Media’s latest title) we stumbled across an entry from a skeptical reader who wondered whether a letter sent to ‘alert’ them of identity theft at their mortgage company was really just a trojan-horse marketing ploy, designed to sell affiliated credit protection services.  Our initial instinct was that this was just [...]

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Weekend Real Estate Slew

by Alex Stenback 05.23.2005

If you are not a regular reader of Barry Ritholtz’s The Big Picture, you should be, and this weekend’s series of lively posts on the real estate market is a good reason why.  We’ve linked the posts individually below, and recommend you head over and read up – taken as a whole, this series of [...]

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