MBA Newslinks Archive

“You can have a great culture and a lousy strategy and win; you can have a great strategy and a lousy culture and lose. Culture eats strategy for lunch. You have to have a high culture to win.”–Todd Duncan, founder and CEO of High Trust, Las Vegas.

“The current world of CMBS is soon to be exclusively post-legacy. These better metrics may translate into more investor demand that supports a virtuous cycle of more competitive CMBS pricing. This may allow CMBS to steal market share from other sectors.”–Brian Olasov, Executive Director of Financial Services Consulting with Carlton Fields, New York.

“People are not putting their homes up for sale, and there are an increasing number of consumers who want to buy homes. We are simply not meeting demand, and that is going to continue to drive up home prices.”–MBA Chief Economist Mike Fratantoni.

“On the whole, there are more substantial hopes for regulatory relief in this Administration than in the past. We hope they won’t be agents of destruction, but rather they are committed to make some meaningful changes to how the CFPB does its rulemaking.”–MBA Senior Vice President of Legislative and Political Affairs Bill Killmer.

“The reality is though, while the housing market has largely recovered, we still face daunting obstacles preventing us from doing what we do best–serving the people and families of our communities.”–MBA Chairman Dave Motley, CMB.

“Major housing market dynamics don’t shift dramatically when the clock strikes midnight on Jan. 1. We anticipate a continuation of the same trends we’ve been seeing for the past few years. Price growth will remain strong as many homeowners will remain deterred from selling due to the low mortgage rates they’ve locked in and the high price of their would-be move-up home.”–Redfin chief economist Nela Richardson.

“Tight inventory, fueled by a tight labor market and low interest rates, propelled home values to record heights in 2017, but the outlook is now much less certain.”–Zillow senior economist Aaron Terrazas.

“There are many similarities between this proposal and MBA’s own plan including the need for a government guarantee behind mortgage-backed securities to support single-family and multifamily finance, two or more competing guarantors, the use of a single security in the single family market and a level playing field for lenders of all sizes and business models.–MBA President and CEO David Stevens, CMB, on a Federal Housing Finance Agency proposal on secondary mortgage market reform.

“It would be the worst result to have 50 or more different approaches enacted across the country. And we believe that by using that Texas model to create our model legislation, legislators will have a degree of comfort to what the industry is suggesting in that our model will look very familiar if they’ve read the Texas bill.”–MBA Vice President of State Government Affairs and Industry Relations William Kooper, in a new MBA on Remote Online Notarization model legislation for states.

“Through its rate hikes and unwinding its balance sheet, the Fed is pushing up short-term rates faster than markets are pushing up longer-term rates. Despite the increase in rates, applications increased both for purchase and refinance. These increases were partly due to an upswing following the holiday season lull and potentially more borrowers trying to refinance before mortgage rates increase further.”–MBA Associate Vice President of Economic Forecasting Joel Kan.