Nature is full of trivia. The moon moves about two inches away from the Earth each year. The Earth gets 100 tons heavier every day due to falling space dust. The climate, obviously, is part of nature. Climate, and natural disasters, impact our clients, people, insurance premiums, and the value of servicing in areas prone to hurricanes, flooding, forest fires, and earthquakes. A certain portion of those events (the number is increasing) are determined by FEMA to be natural disasters, and last year 3.4 million adults in the U.S. were at one point or another forced to evacuate their homes due to one, according to the Census Bureau. Approximately 1.4 percent of the American adult population. That’s a lot higher than historical averages, up to 800,000 on average for the years between 2008 and 2021. 12 percent were people displaced for over six months and 16 percent were adults who never returned home. The Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) Research Institute for Housing Amer
As noted in yesterday’s commentary, mergers and acquisitions of lenders are in the news across the nation. For curious lenders, it is good to have a general guide in how a buyer goes about valuing a lender. I happen to be in rainy Chicago now, but 1,700 miles away, there’s interesting news from the Phoenix area and the desert. How would you appraise a perfectly fine home that had no water? Rio Verde, aptly named Green River, a neighborhood outside of Scottsdale, Arizona, with some 2,000 homes, recently learned that there is not a stable water supply. The 1980s Groundwater Management Act required that in order for a development six lots or larger to proceed in Arizona, it had to secure a 100-year supply of water. The Rio Verde Foothills developers kept splitting parcels into four to five lots, putting them under the six-lot minimum that applied to the law and avoiding that requirement. About 30 percent of the residents now face a dramatic change in price as the city has cu
I’ve never seen my cat Myrtle fly commercial. That aside, time “flies” by, Tom Brady retired again, and here’s a trivia question for your friends and family: how many 747’s did Boeing produce before the last one rolled off the assembly line yesterday? Over 54 years, about two per month. (And did you catch that subtle word play?) Changing the scale, one would be hard-pressed to find the financial section of a newspaper in the last 54 months that didn’t mention the Federal Reserve or inflation (the Fed does not set the inflation rate, nor mortgage rates), and today we’ll have yet another announcement about the targeted range of Fed Funds. (It is the interest rate that banks charge each other to borrow or lend excess reserves overnight.) But wait! High inflation is a problem, but… Weak inflation could become a long-term challenge after high inflation ends, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says. Unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, this late