Mike Novak-Smith

REO agent

RE/Max

(Full Bio)

Ted Boeker

Owner and Broker

RE/Max

(Full Bio)

This week Bruce Norris is joined by Mike Novak-Smith and Ted Boeker. Mike Novak-Smith is not only one of the largest REO agents in the Inland Empire, but the nation. Mike is in the top 1% of all real estate agents nationwide and is experienced in REO, short sales, bankruptcies, asset management, and negotiating. Mike specializes in REOs in Riverside, Moreno Valley, San Bernardino, Perris, Rialto, Colton, and Corona. Ted Boeker is the owner of the company that Mike is at and has brokered for RE/Max Results in Moreno Valley. Having started the company in 1989, Ted has vast experience in real estate and has been able to train and lead 35 of Southern California’s highest producing real estate brokers and agents to close deals quickly and efficiently for a variety of clients in commercial, residential, multifamily, and office real estate. Nationwide Home Loans Inc. and RE/Max Results escrow division are associated companies. Before that, Ted practiced law.

Ted opened a business in 1989, which was a peak year. Things changed radically after this, and Bruce wondered if this was something that as a part of his business model he saw changing very quickly or if it surprised him. Ted said he would love to say he foresaw a lot of things, but he really did not see much coming. He had come out of commercial real estate, which died after the 1986 Tax Reform Act; and he said there was nothing in commercial to do so he should look at residential. It looked attractive at the time, but he never dreamed they would see the ups and downs that they have. Ted said it was probably good to start when he did because it did steal him through some of the early tough times. The flexibility of a business model all of a sudden became absolute. You could not do farming and be surviving in the ‘90s, and you could not do it after 2006 either.

Bruce went to a meeting at Ted’s company where he talked, and remembered prior to the meeting when they were talking about volume of sales. They were talking about the number of closings that Mike had and the other people who were ahead. Bruce also envisioned a meeting he was not at in 2006 where everybody is doing pretty well, and he wondered how you tell somebody that is doing well that their model is about to radically change and they have to do it before it actually happens. Ted said it is not easy as real estate agents are a wide variety of people, some well educated and others not so much. The biggest example is 3 years ago Ted started harping on short sales, being able to hopefully foresee what was coming. However, agents two years ago said Ted was crazy and they were not going to do what he was talking about. Ted said today about 40% of his sales are short sales. The agents who refused it are probably gone, and the ones who embraced it are doing relatively well to the marketplace. There are not a lot of easy commission checks anywhere.

Mike has been involved in the REO listing side for 21 years. The first REO ever listed was in January 1991. He worked at a Century 21 Office where they could not give away the REO. It basically paid 5% commission instead of 6%. He made a referral, but he was number 9 one the list; so when they finally got to him he knew the economy was declining. The Persian Gulf War had started, and things were tough. He thought if he could do the deal at 2% he could still make the house and car payments and could eat another month. This was why he carried out the deal. Anybody that declined the deal at the time is no longer in the business. Prior to doing the REOs, Mike’s business model was to show up at a Century 21 office and try to live off the floor time and advertise, which he did well. People would just walk in and say they wanted to buy or sell a house and you wrote up the deal. It was easy. Mike also started in 1989 at the very peak year and then quickly transitioned into unknown territory. The 90s was not replicated and it was not the normal downturn. In the ‘80s we had the radical interest rate change, but we did not have a price decline because we were able to borrow the cheap financing and move it forward to other buyers. In the 90s we took a 5% gradual decline every year for a while, and this was news to everyone who owned California real estate.

Bruce wondered how the 2006-2011 downturns differed from what Ted experienced in the 90s as a business owner. Ted said he did not remember the 90s as well because they never really got up to speed. It took them ten years to get up to a critical mass of agents and holding on through the tough times. The early 2000s were good, and then the falloff was a real shock. When they saw the change in 2008, it was the big change for them. In 2008 and 2009 they had a lot of REOs, and then nothing for two years. This is the biggest challenge he has ever had. They have really been able to tighten up and cut out expenses, but that is the key.

As far as the cycles went, Mike said in the 90s he could predict better what was going to happen. He could see the start and the end game. Now it just seems like it is never going to end. It was easier back then to predict your business than compared to now. You get a lot of curve balls today that you did not get then. As far as quantity of listings in this current cycle, Mike said the peak year for him and for everybody in general was 2008. We did not have the government intrusion that we had in the last 3 years, and this is a big frustration.

Bruce wondered what the following years as far as percentages went after 2008 if that year was a 100% year. Mike said in 2008 it went down about 20% for him and 60% in ’10. In ’11, it picked up a little bit but still went down about 50%. Bruce also wondered if anybody on the lender side is saying to either Mike or Ted that they will not be releasing so many or if they are always telling them to step up. What he heard for a long time was to maintain the staff and not cut anybody back, and this was kind of a mistake. He carried too much overhead through a lot of 2010, and he finally decided he was going to have to cut it back. He is okay with not making any money sometimes, but he hates having to feed it. Now he has the right amount of staff, and if they pay attention and operate well, they can make money. When you talk to asset management, the general opinion of people is they do not want to sit there and say they are not going to have a job. They believe it is going to pick up and they are going to have REOs to sell so they will have a job. He believes this is what a lot of it comes down to overall, and he does not believe anybody can predict what is going to happen. They are probably not at the policy decision level. With someone in Mike’s position, one of the nation’s largest, he would probably feel that he has access to somebody inside actually telling him the real scoop. However, this does not happen. Mike said he does know some people way up the food chain from various REO organizations, and even they cannot tell you what is going to happen.

Mike’s REO business peaked in 2008 when we had about a 3.4% delinquency rate, and we went up to 11.2%. Mike’s peak of foreclosures resulted from a 3.2% delinquency, and then we tripled. The amount of REOs he probably should have been handling should have been some gigantic percentage above the peak and its decline. The shadow inventory term is real, but it is not where people think it is. Mike’s opinion of what shadow inventory is the process that is not being finished. There are a lot of defaults going on, but the timeframe between when somebody misses the first payment to the time they foreclose is probably in many cases 18 months to 2 years. He asks a lot of people how long since they made their payment and this is the answer he usually gets. He rarely gets anybody less than a year; but he thinks the whole process has just slowed down, and this is your shadow inventory. It is not like the banks are sitting on millions of houses they own; they just don’t finish the foreclosure. Bruce wondered if there is a valid reason why they don’t do this, and Mike said part of the reason is if they just foreclosed every which way they could, they would not have the capability to handle the property. He hears of agents telling him they are in a really bad situation and don’t even want to foreclose because they do not want the house back. They don’t want to be responsible for the code liens and the taxes.

Bruce said what is interesting to him is somebody always tells him that the lenders are too smart in regards to carrying out foreclosures, but in 2008 they did exactly what they should not have done. They foreclosed on properties aggressively, and we ended up with something like 17 months of inventory and a price decline of about 3 or 4% a month. Once you are there on that low level of price and everybody is upside down; it is much easier to make a decision to walk when you have negative 50% equity. When the civil Code 1169 came into effect in California, you could be fined $1,000 a day if you are the lender owning the property or a trustee sale buyer owning a property. They have someone come out and visit your place, and you have a week or two to fix whatever they are going to see.

When Mike resells REOs, Bruce wondered if there was a big problem with liens that had been placed on the property. Mike said they have a lot of problems with liens. He has a full-time employee whose job is dealing with liens, code violations, and HOA problems. Part of the problem with a lot of the banks is they do not have the internal staff anymore to handle these problems. It used to be they had attorneys on staff that would fix a lot of the code violations and a lot of the liens, and now a lot of that is not done. We do not figure it out until we start marketing the property and they come up. He said he fronts a lot of money to pay code violations and liens because typically the agents expect you to pay them and then be reimbursed. They are on it full-time, checking properties every day as he does not want any code violations and does not want to front the money for it. It is a lot bigger problem than it once was.

Bruce wondered what percentages of his listings were occupied by somebody at the end of the foreclosure process, which Mike said was about 75%. The attitude of the person behind the door is usually bewilderment as they wonder how something like this could happen, and most of these people are tenants of the former borrower. They did not know they were about to be asked to go.

On the topic of Cash for Keys, once this type of thing happens it becomes a street lore and urban legend. You can go ahead and ask for cash for keys, plus with some of the clients they are told how much cash for keys is going to be. A large problem Mike has is a lot of clients are very generous with cash for keys and some are not. Many of them ask why they only receive $1500 when their friend received $8,000. Bruce said if the Learning Annex was still in business, he could be almost certain there was a class held at night. The Cash for Keys is a big deal, but the offers vary a lot, and this can cause some problems. Bruce wondered if it has to do with the size of the loan or just the motivation of the lender, to which Mike said it is the latter. The more well known you are today as a lender, the more you want to pay.

Bruce wondered how big of a problem MERS robo-signing presented to California lenders. Mike said he has not seen much of it where it was a problem. He does believe with a lot of their deals a lot of the loans are in pools and portfolios, and sometimes they get slowed down because someone is going to check the whole portfolio, whether most of the loans are in Chicago or Florida. Sometimes this will slow them down. Something that was originally going to close, for example, in January will not close until March. However, the bigger issue is they are in a mix of properties.

On the myth of bulk sales and bulk REO listings, Bruce said he has only fallen victim to this one time as he went around an looked at 100 houses in two days to get his piece of the dream. However, there have been people who spent a year and ruined themselves by following something that seemed imminent that they were going to cash in on 100 houses. Mike does deal with a lot of REOs, and Bruce wondered if he has dealt with successful bulk deals in California only. He said Fannie Mae and several others do pool sales and advertise for it, but it is usually beyond the capability of the small investors. It does happen, but where he gets the calls is from some person who wants to buy ten houses in bulk, and the problem with that is with many of the lenders there are ten different investors on the deals. It is not the same real seller when you get down to the bottom line. Bruce wondered if he feels there are sufficient properties going that route that it affects the volume that they see, but Mike said this was not the case.

Another topic is bulk note sales, where you have big companies buy thousands of loans at a shot. Bruce wondered if this is significant in its impact in the REO listings. Mike said he is not sure he has seen them, even if it is possible they are going on. You do not see them in California has much as you see them in other places. In Orange County, there is a company in Irvine that buys very large pools, but the majority of the loans are not in California yet. Even if the purchaser received 60% off of the face, it would be hard to say that there would be a lot of room.

Bruce was a moderator of a panel on bulk buying that HousingWire.com had a couple years ago. He was very fascinated with the concept and thought it could really happen to somebody. Of the three, one of the companies that was on the panel was capable of buying 1,000 homes in a very short notice was Williams and Williams Auction Company. Bruce knew Tommy Williams personally, so he talked to him, the person he thought would really know. Having auctioneers all over the country, their infrastructure is such that they literally could get a 1,000 property listing within two or three days, legitimately see every one of them, and come to a number. They had not bought a property in a year, so they had the capacity, but there was not any inventory that was going that route in that kind of volume. Bruce just heard of another scenario yesterday about a bulk sale from one particular lender, so it is such a great theory. However, Ted said somebody actually has to go out and look at the properties to make sure they are even there. Ted said they have had REOs they have gone out to look at that are not even there and had burned down about a year earlier.

It seems one of the things RE/Max would really have a grasp on is how much infrastructure there is as far as capacity to move inventory already in place. They do not have to invent a thing. Bruce wondered how many more listings they could have, if they could have a multiple of 300-400% alone. This is replicated everywhere. Someone could drop a lot of properties into the United States REOs, and it would get absorbed by current staff. Another option is trained staff is added, and this would make more sense more than selling thousands of homes to a hedge fund. There were couple of things in a report Bruce read, and one of the things was doing a big bulk deal. A couple days later he saw a headline for a $650 million pool by one of the well known big companies that they were going to buy REOs and retain them as rentals. This sounds significant until you look at the numbers of how much debt there is in excess. You basically have a $3 trillion problem when you start throwing $50 million at it and see how it is such an insignificant thing. In short of saying they are going to forgive everybody, whoever owes more than their house is worth, we are probably in for a long haul. There is really no end in sight and no end game. Neither is there a change in the aggression of lenders saying they should cut to the chase and take all the REOs back. If a lot of the houses were sold to hedge funds, they would be a lot more aggressive because they would not care about their name being drug through the mud. They do not have a public name or a retail presence, and this is most likely part of the reason why things are slow in some cases.

One of the suggestions in the white report was getting a deed in lieu of foreclosure and giving the people right to buy the property back some years later. Bruce wondered what their thoughts were on the same owner returning as owner at a later time. However, Ted said this is silly. Once a person has given up on the property as we have seen and stopped making payments a year or two earlier, when you go to that person see them start making payments again, that person just laughs at the agents in charge. Bruce does not know how you rationalize this with the person next door making payments on the same loan. You start asking yourself if you can get the deal too. Mike and Ted said one of their clients offered the ability for the occupants to lease the property for a year. Mike and Ted said they have started a few of these, but they have yet to see anybody finish before they failed and ended up being evicted. For them, not paying is a good deal and they want it to continue.

Bruce read another news article where they were talking to a family that had not made a payment in a couple years, and it was a very positive experience for them as far as what it did for them financially. If you think about it, they have an expectation that this is okay, and there is an expectation that it is almost sad when it ends. Of the people who have not made a payment in two years, the ones who have saved all the payments is 0%. There is a statistic that 4,100,000 people that are 90 days late or beyond, including REOs, there is only a 1% chance that they will willingly write a check to make it current. 99% of the pile is going to go the route of a lowered opening bid at a trustee sale, a short sale, or an REO.

In RE/Max’s business model, the short sales have really aggressively gained momentum. Bruce wondered if they are ahead of REOs as far as closings. However, Ted and Mike believe they are even. Last year, roughly, they had about 20% normal sales and about evenly divided between short sales and REOs. Bruce has looked at charts for years, and he said he has not come up with a real meaning with what was just said regarding REOs and short sales until recently. When you close 100 sales, only 20 buyers emerge. This really hit Bruce that in the Inland Empire 80% of the closings are either going to be vacant or bought by someone new migrating here or someone in credit damage or investor for cash. This is not a lot of people. Unfortunately, it is many of the people who walked from their homes three years ago and now have repaired their credit and are able to buy again. There are very few of those, but it is shocking in today’s world that the person who did the wrong thing three years ago seems to be saving the system. Had we foreclosed on somebody instead of waiting, the people who are behind by 2 ½ years have not had one day of new credit.

Tune in next week as Bruce continues his interview with Mike Novak-Smith and Ted Boeker. For more information on RE/Max, visit www.remax-results-ca.com/.

For more information about The Norris Group’s California hard money loans or our California Trust Deed investments, visit the website or call our office at 951-780-5856 for more information. For upcoming California real estate investor training and events, visit The Norris Group website and our California investor calendar. You’ll also find our award-winning real estate radio show on KTIE 590am at 6pm on Saturdays or you can listen to over 170 podcasts in our free investor radio archive.

Robert Kleinhenz

Chief Economist for LAEDC

(Full Bio)

This week Bruce Norris is joined once again by Robert Kleinhenz. Robert is the Chief Economist of the Kyser Center for Economic Research, which conducts research on regional, state, and national economies. Dr. Kleinhenz has a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Michigan, a Masters and Doctorate from USC, all in economics. Prior to joining LAEDC, he served as Deputy Chief Economist at the California Association of Realtors and taught economics for over 15 years, most recently at California State University Fullerton.

Bruce said he recently poked around at a refi and quoted a rate that he could barely understand. He said it was something like 3 7/8 for a 30-year mortgage. Bruce said going back 30 years when he became an investor and had refinanced his house at the time to get the money; it was perfect timing back in 1981 when he paid 17 ½ % fixed. Robert said there may have been a couple recessions in between, but what a difference two decades makes. Bruce wonders if when you are 22 and just starting out if you are thinking that it is in any way normal where you are only accustomed to seeing numbers that start with a 5 or a 4, and he wonders how different the future will be with the particular rate going forward. In this case you are comparing what happened back in the early 1980s to the interest rate situation today.

Robert said if he were to place a bet on what was likely to be more normal in the foreseeable future, he would look at the interest rate climate of today and not of the early 1980s. Back in that time we had high rates of inflation, and we had an economy that was in transition and stagnating in several sectors for several reasons. The main thing was we had a lot of inflation, partly driven by high oil prices. This in turn led to high interest rates and at the time the Paul Volcker of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York led efforts to bring the reign of inflation down. One of the ways it did that was by increasing rates by making it very difficult to borrow. This was a much different climate, and hopefully economists have learned a little bit about keeping inflation in check. Hopefully policymakers have listened to the economists who talk about it, and we are most likely going to stay in an environment over the next few years that either has low or moderate inflation and not double-digit inflation.

Bruce read a quote saying, “Experience is something that lets you recognize a mistake when you make it again.” What is interesting about not being concerned about the people that are in charge of policies is their opinion of how benign the housing problem was going to be. This bothered Bruce; and Robert reiterated saying policymakers are humans like us and sometimes don’t get the information right and sometimes still make poor judgments. We definitely have to be concerned about the fact that mistakes are made on the policy side just as mistakes were made on the business side of things. This gave rise to the situation we face today.

Bruce wondered if Robert was concerned about deflation if not inflation. He said it is not that he is not concerned about inflation, but he does not expect to see high levels of inflation over the foreseeable future, and that is predicated on policymakers and their ability to make the right decisions. It hinges on the ability of the Congress to come up with a credible plan to take care of these federal deficits over the long term. Somebody has to be interested in a bond that the risk-level seems appropriate with the return. What is interesting is the one-year T-Bill in Greece is paying 402% as of yesterday, which would probably give you an idea that you should not invest in it as you are not going to get your principle back.

The likelihood that the United States would find itself in the same position that Greece finds itself in is very low, so we should not be too alarmed. There is a very real possibility that we may face a debt situation, but there are several moving parts here. Fortunately, the ace in the hole that we have here in the United States is the fact that the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency, and our Treasuries tend to be the flight to safety for so many investors around the globe when things go awry elsewhere. Bruce did not know how profound an effect this would have because this is exactly what happened when you talk about a ten-year T-Bill. Most of us would have anticipated seeing something under 4% was pretty astonishing, and then it was under 2%. If someone has not already refinanced their house, you definitely need to be sitting up and taking a look at rates today because those rates are fundamentally driven by what is happening with the yield on the ten-year treasury, which nobody would have expected would fall below 3 or 4%, and here it has consistently been under 2% for quite some time. All of this is courtesy of something that is really outside of our borders. Part of this also stems from the Fed’s commitment to maintain low rates over the foreseeable future through the middle of 2013. There was this policy move and effort to insure that long rates stay low partly to help the housing market and to get investors to pay attention to the stock market where it would theoretically be better returns. There are a number of angles behind the Fed’s move, but this has served to also keep rates down.

To insure that something like what was aforementioned is in the Fed’s control, they would have a limited ability to do it. If the market moves in a big way, they may not be able to buck that trend. However, it does accomplish that end by buying or selling securities in such a way as to maintain rates at the levels that they are targeting at this time. We have a 0-fit fund rate and a mortgage rate under 4%. If we were to have an issue where the Euro zone went into a tough recession, Bruce wondered if there would be a domino effect here that could possibly kick us into a another recession. Robert said the cards we are looking at in 2012 include the situation happening in Europe. If their economy is weakened or there is some concern that we have already seen of economies tipping into recession; then that could jeopardize the situation here in the United States. We’re out of the recession and growing and now in the expansionary phase coming out of the recession, so that could tamper the growth or lead to a stall out in the economy here in the United States. This is economic linkage between the European economies and the U.S. economy.

The other linkage is the financial linkage. If the sovereign debt problem in Europe, not just in Greece but also Italy and possibly France, give rise to problems with banks not unlike what we had a few years ago at the height of the financial crisis, then that could stymie activity in the financial world once again. As a result of that, it could have a feedback effect on the real economy and either slow the growth pattern of the U.S. economy or tip it into recession. You have two things coming out of Europe that have the potential to either slow down or derail our current expansion. When the United States had defaults on the mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, and the CDOs, it had quite a direct effect on the people that invested in the banks.

Bruce wondered if the United States has as much of the investment there in Europe, or is it mostly contained inside of their own banking system. Robert answered that it was incestuous in a way in that there are flows capital that go across international boundaries through commercial banks; so if there is a problem that shows up over there, it may also show up on the balance sheets of banks over here. It is through this particular conduit or channel that we would see problems occur. Robert said he would be very surprised if we have something as calamitous as what we saw in 2008. To look at this situation in the financial sector, we have to recognize that so many financial decisions rest on some confidence of what is going to be occurring in the future. If you lack confidence in the future or just don’t know, then you are unlikely to make a decision or make a decision to do nothing. The problem with financial crises that we went through in 2008 is that they have long-lasting effects and wreak havoc on consumer and business confidence. They then leave businesses and households to sit on their hands until they get a sense that the coast is clear. That is one of the reasons this recession was so deep and continues to keep going as long as it has been. There is a real concern about the outlook, and it is reflected in consumer confidence and business confidence that has just not really shown marked improvement over the last couple years.

Bruce wondered if there is real concern about the oil world and if there is fear about aggressive actions such as the closing of the straight. Robert said if we take a step back to 2011 for a moment and think about all of the wild cards that played out in 2011, there are a lot and a number are still playable in 2012. There was earlier discussion on the European debt situation, which is a wild card that has been played several times over the past few years. The Greek debt crisis seems to be the one that is played most frequently. If you take a look at the Arab Spring, that gave rise to disruptions in the flow of oil and gave rise to higher oil prices. There is always the chance that something in the world of energy that triggers an increase in the price of energy, oil or otherwise, there is always the chance that this could slow down economic activity if not derail a growing economy. The other wild card that we have to contend with in 2012 that we also dealt with in 2011 was political. This year the big political wild card is what will happen in November with the election. It does appear as though we are going to continue to be stepping carefully through 2012, hoping that these wild cards do not wreak too much havoc on the economy. If they do, then they have an adverse impact on confidence. If there is an adverse impact on confidence, then the growth we anticipated is just not going to materialize.

In the employment sector, Bruce wondered how important construction is to the improvement of the unemployment. Robert said it is an important segment of the economy but is essentially flat on its back right now in California and elsewhere around the country. If you look at residential activity in the state of California, permits for example, they are just a fraction of what they were in years past. They have been at this very low level for just a fraction of any long-run numbers for the last few years, but it makes sense. If so many foreclosed or distressed properties are available for sale at a fraction of the cost of new construction, it is going to be sometime until after the backlog of distressed properties gets substantially moved before we see construction pick up in a noticeable way. There is a broad market for housing where distressed property values are probably way down on other properties. Things are also the same way with commercial construction. There are a lot of high vacancy rates for office buildings these days; less so for retail and certainly much less so for industrial. Industrial in Southern California is actually outperforming markets around the country. It has less than a 5% vacancy factor, so it is very much a mixed bag. However, construction is going to be recovering slowly, so meanwhile we should take a step back.

In a general sense, the labor market seems to be at a turning point where in order to produce more in 2012, it seems very likely that employers are actually going to have to add people, not just ask their existing labor force to work longer hours. There should be a general upturn in employment in 2012 compared to 2011. It is just a question of how much of an upturn there will be. We need somewhere around 300,000 jobs added per month across the nation in order to bring the unemployment down in a noticeable way in a reasonable amount of time.

The most recent report, the one for December, showed that we added 200,000 jobs, which was a great number based on the recent history. It is just not a high enough level of growth to bring the unemployment rate down. At 200,000 jobs per month, it could take 4 or 5 years for us to get back to a 6% unemployment rate nationally. At 300,000 jobs per month, it would only take a little less than two years, which is a huge difference. At the present time, we should be banking on the 200,000 jobs per month, barring any of these wild cards being played. If that happens for a few months time, then we might actually see the economy gain some ground.

The sector that is in the driver’s seat here is the consumer sector. Consumers are weighed down by uncertainty about their jobs and their economic outlook. The fact that are assets are not worth what they had been worth and the fact that they may have some credit constraints, access to credit may not be what it had been, especially with respect to buying homes. All those things are constraining growth and consumer spending, and that is really the main thing that we need to look for in terms of the driver behind the overall economy. If consumer spending picks up, then we are going to see job gains pick up as well.

In looking at a chart for mortgage equity withdrawal in 2002-2006, it was responsible for a lot of GDP growth. This driver has certainly been diminished if not eliminated from most people’s possibilities. As we go forward, it is certainly going to be the case that the American consumer is still going to have a place for the use of credit. They may not have access to the same amount of credit that was available when they were able to use their home equity in order to finance so many things. This is not a bad thing because it does seem to have created problems, especially problems that have spilled back into the housing sector. We do not want to go back this way, but we do expect to see that some loosening of credit access on the part of consumers would probable enable the consumer sector to get a little bit more steam and give a little bit more push to the overall economy.

Another issue is shadow inventory. Bruce wondered what Robert’s thoughts on what shadow inventory contains are. The definition of shadow inventory has changed over the last couple years, so Bruce wondered what Robert feels is the shadow inventory and what the best resolution for it is. Robert said it is useful for us to get a sense of how long we are going to be dealing with large numbers of distressed properties. If we use that as the definition and ask what things going to be like two years out, then the shadow inventory is the inventory that is on the books, such as MLS inventory for existing homes plus unsold new homes, and the unsold inventory for existing homes in the state of California, which is about 5 months inventory. Five months inventory is enough to actually sustain increases in prices and not decreases in prices because the average is about seven months, so we are at seven months if we are under five. By then we would go through the foreclosure pipeline, and the thing we would pick up would be the number of REO properties that are held by banks in inventory. This is equal to about another 2 ½ months of inventory. Now you are getting over seven months when you take the five mentioned earlier and add 2 ½ months, then there properties that are scheduled for auction and also another 2 ½ months inventory. However, the timeline for that is a much longer timeline.

For the REO properties, the point in time they go into inventory might be about 6 months or so before they are prepped and sold. The relevant shadow inventory number to use for current market conditions and understand what is happening in the current market is probably MLS based inventory plus new homes plus REOs in inventory. If we are asking the question about how long this is going to be with us, then we are going to go further up the foreclosure pipeline and pick up the properties that are in a pre-foreclosure state, such as an NOD or delinquent property. If this is the case, then you are looking at another 2 ½ months inventory. This is simply by taking the number of properties that are in pre-foreclosure state, which is roughly 100,000, and looking at that relative to total annual sales. You also have to look at the timeline. An NOD that is filed in January of 2012 is probably about 18 months away from going into the REO inventory. These numbers are roughly 100,000 in REO inventory and roughly 100,000 NODs plus delinquencies at the present time for the state of California. The timeframe is not anywhere close to normal as the statutory timeframe is about 6 months. Because of different kinds of policies and other factors, this timeline has been stretched out; and a number of lender and servicers have encountered a number of problems along the way.

The bottom line is as we are going further up the ladder and actually including more and more things in this notion of shadow inventory, we also have to figure out how long it is going to take to push all the properties through the foreclosure pipeline and out through the new home market. Therefore, we are looking all the way into 2014 before things get any closer to normal levels of distressed properties. The housing market is going to feel like it has recovered before that period of time, but we are going to have substantial numbers of distressed properties working through the housing market over the next three years. In Riverside, 62% of the sales are either short sales or foreclosures, which means when you sell 1,000 homes, only 380 buyers emerge. Everyone else is credit damage. This is going to take a while to heal.

If you want to learn more about Robert’s company, the Kaiser Foundation, go to LAEDC at www.laedc.org. Here, you can find out about the annual forecast event that will be happening this February 15th in downtown Los Angeles. This is a ticketed event.

For more information about The Norris Group’s California hard money loans or our California Trust Deed investments, visit the website or call our office at 951-780-5856 for more information. For upcoming California real estate investor training and events, visit The Norris Group website and our California investor calendar. You’ll also find our award-winning real estate radio show on KTIE 590am at 6pm on Saturdays or you can listen to over 170 podcasts in our free investor radio archive.

Robert Kleinhenz

Chief Economist for LAEDC

(Full Bio)

This week Bruce Norris is joined by Robert Kleinhenz. Robert is the Chief Economist of the Kyser Center for Economic Research, which conducts research in regional, state, and national economies. Dr. Kleinhenz has a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of Michigan, a Masters and Doctorate from USC, all in economics. Prior to joining LAEDC, he served as Deputy Chief Economist at the California Association of Realtors and taught economics for over 15 years, most recently at California State University Fullerton.

The Kyser Center is within the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation or LAEDC, which among other things is interested in promoting the local economy and doing what it can do to help local businesses to streamline permitting processes and promote a long-run vision of where the region is headed in terms of the economy and related issues. The Kyser Center’s economic research function is in support of this. They carry on what is happening in the economy and what is happening with key sectors in the economy. They also produce forecasts, one coming up on February 15 in downtown L.A. They have an annual forecast that comes out at the beginning of the year in February and a mid-year forecast update that typically is released in July. This is the one that Bruce took a serious look at a few nights ago, and one of the things that really impressed him was it was not in the least bit promotional. He said it was very informational and quite candid if it had to be negative. This is one of the things that have given rise to the reputation of the Kyser Center and the LAEDC have established over time. Their forecasts have really maintained their objectivity when looking at issues pertaining to the regional economy; so they have a lot of credibility, which they had even before he came on board.

It’s a great asset for the community to have this kind of document. When it becomes promotional and inaccurate, it does not help anybody map out a proper business plan. We are certainly at a key point here. 2012 is a pivotal year where potentially we can see the local economic situation and the national situation accelerate if the right things fall into place. You have to have an objective view on things as business people so that these business people can make smart decisions about their future and the future for their businesses. When you are dealing with the local economy, even one as large as Southern California and Los Angeles, you also have to determine how effective we are by state and federal level decisions. The most obvious impact that we have seen over the last couple of years is that the budget problems that have popped up at the state and have filtered down to the local level have given rise to real job losses in the public sector. Therefore, the private sector is adding jobs that are much needed jobs.

We have unemployment rates that continue to be stubbornly high. The economy and the labor market have both been very slow in recovering from this most recent recession. Anything that detracts from growth is problematic; and unfortunately one of the very weak segments of the labor market over the last couple years has been public sector or the government labor numbers. They have been declining even as the private sector has been taking off, so that is certainly one constraint that we have to deal with in the immediate term. The longer term issue that we need to bear in mind is that the state and county government agencies are often times responsible for so many infrastructures that we rely upon, both physical infrastructure and the education of our young people. Both of these are things that concerns Robert as they look at the longer timeframe and the role the government plays.

Bruce wondered if education needs have started to shift. One of the things Bruce read that was very interesting to him was the manufacturing sector. It is not something we think about being a major player; yet it really is, but there are shifts occurring. As far as education is concerned, you go to high-school through college. Bruce wondered if you emerge as a useful participant in the manufacturing sector in any of the training to where you can take on a high-tech manufacturing jobs and function. Robert said it is safe to say that the jobs that the people who went to high school and college will be taking on through the course of their career are jobs that we know nothing about right now. The most important thing one gets from a college education in particular is learning how to think and to adapt to what is a changing workplace environment. There are really dramatic changes that take place both in the consumer side and in the industry side. You have a sector of the economy that is quite dynamic and is one of the leading sectors here in Southern California. Putting it differently, Southern California is one of the leading manufacturing centers here in the United States. At the same time, in the United States manufacturing is still one of the leading GDP. It is a high-value added segment of the economy, but it has experienced a trend decline in the number of people working in that sector over time because much automation has taken place that has displaced some workers. Manufacturing on a wide, broad scale such as mass production of goods, frequently goes offshore because they can produce at a much lower wage or lower cost of goods produced outside of the United States and certainly outside of Southern California.

When Bruce read the document, he said the thing he found interesting was the number of jobs was down, the number of products produced was way up, and the earnings per worker was up. The people who are working in manufacturing have to be more skilled today than their predecessors had to be ten or twenty years ago. They probably have some training in computers and other types of automation, so it is no longer that you have strong hands and a strong back. You also have to have a pretty nimble mind to be able to do what is necessary in these jobs, which are increasingly automated and require some knowledge of sophisticated machinery. The first question was really if in the education process if we are taking people through it, do we need a college degree to understand how to operate that particular piece of machinery even though it is technical? Do we have trade types of training that are taking that on?

Robert said that particular aspect of education in the United States, which is typically provided by trade schools and community colleges, is one that is often overlooked. However, Robert believes it is very important to training people for jobs that don’t require a college degree but do require something more than an unskilled background. You have to have skilled workers. One of the things we are contending with now and really have for quite some time is that we probably do not dedicate enough of our resources and educational resources to training people for those kinds of jobs. There is so much emphasis and so much pressure on seeing people complete their Bachelors Degree, which is important for the reasons that he mentioned at the beginning. However, it does not really create someone who has a great deal of versatility. However, there are a lot of other jobs. Robert had just spoken with one of the business assistant managers, and he said there are a lot of jobs for which you have to have a certain set of skills. Many people who are running businesses right here in Southern California right now have job openings for skilled workers, but they cannot find people with the appropriate skills to fill those spots. It is a challenge right here and now, and it is an ongoing challenge for years to come.

We also have an aging workforce who with those skills will be retiring, and there will be even more of a need for those replacement skilled people with very high-paying wages. The fact of the matter is the baby boomer generation, particularly the oldest members of the baby boomer generation, turned 65 last year in 2011. In terms of numbers, the first few years that are marked by that boomer generation have fairly small population numbers. However, as you see people who were born in the early 1950s to the mid to late 1950s, you see that this is where you have the real bubble in terms of population growth in that particular generation. In the next 3-4 years, we are probably going to be looking at what could be a fairly large number of people going into retirement. There are probably not as many people choosing to retire as would have been the case before the recession. Still, large numbers of people will at least consider retirement or maybe going to a part-time schedule. This may lead to a void in the workforce in terms of many skills, not to mention the experience that these individuals have accumulated over so many years of work.

Bruce said when you do have this baby boom generation begin to retire, it brings up more pressure on the budget. The California budget and the national budget both have their share of problems. Bruce wondered if we solve it by aggressive cuts and austerity, or do we solve it with some type of growth program that makes sense. Robert said that as far as the budget situation at the national level is concerned, it is important for us to break it into two parts. You have the budget deficit at the federal level, the $1.3 trillion deficit, and the corresponding level of national debt. The high deficits that we have seen over the last couple years stem in part from the weakness of the economy, which has lead to reduced tax revenues. At the same time, especially with the stimulus program that actually came and went the high expenditures that were a part of that stimulus program and other programs has driven a wedge between the amount of money that the government was bringing in and the amount of money that was spending. However, as the economy improves, that wedge should narrow. Robert believes this will improve over time, so he is less concerned about that and more concerned about the Social Security program and Medicare, both of which could escalate out of control and dominate the budget before too long. It would be in the 2020s by which time it might happen, but certainly changes will take place between now and then to prevent that from happening. Robert does not think we would sit back and just let it happen.

There was a joint committee that worked on the aforementioned suggestions; they produced a document, then when it got to Congress it seemed both sides were not interested in the conclusions and looked like they pushed it forward to 2013. Because of that, this was one of the things that pushed rating agencies to downgrade the United States credit situation. Bruce found this interesting because since he is connected to real estate; his assumption would have been that we have a downgrade and an interest rate hike. However, this was not what happened. If we are talking specifically about the downgrade and what happened at the time back in August of last year; that downgrade and the anticipated impact on interest rates for T-Bills and Treasury notes was trumped by what was happening in Europe, specifically the sovereign debt crisis. This was a much bigger problem; so instead of having a spike in treasury rates as a result of the downgrade, we had a flight to safety globally to U.S. government securities. This pushed yields down, not up.

We are fortunate in that we continue the dominant and reserve currency that so many countries around the globe rely on, and we continue to be the safe haven for investors not just around the globe, but also here in the United States. That worked to our advantage that time as it pushed yields and pushed rates down at a time when rates otherwise might have increased. Robert said he is not terribly concerned about the downgrade, but he does think we all need to be worried about the reaction in Washington D.C. to problems with the deficit and the fact that they are not willing to take action. The credit markets are most likely watching this carefully. If after the 2012 election we do not see a real concerted effort and a real plan to take care of these long-term concerns with respect to the federal budget, then he would be more concerned about downgrades of our credit.

If we get to this is 2013, Bruce wondered if we are going to go the route of austerity and how we would produce GDP growth from this. The kind of austerity programs that have been talked about and implemented in the European economies, unfortunately, do damage to the economy in the near term so that they can get their financial house in order. The levels of indebtedness and sovereign debt in countries like Greece and Italy, relative to the overall economy, are much higher than here in the United States. If there was a belt tightening that was required in order to set things straight in the United States, it would certainly hinder a growing economy and could slow down the pace of expansion. For the record, it does not feel like we are out of the recession, but we have been expanding and our GDP is higher now than it was in the last peak. Technically the economy recovered from a recession and started to expand. If we do go through an austerity program of sorts, it would either slow down that rate of growth that is mediocre at best right now; or it could tip us back into a recession. These are things we have to be very concerned about going forward a year or so out.

The GDP numbers have actually accelerated past the former peak, but we had 8 million jobs lost and have only rehired 2 million of those people. This is one of the quandaries we find ourselves in this particular economic cycle, and we should not be surprised by it. We had the recession, and it was the Great Recession; so it was the worst recession in the working lifetimes of many people. It was a large recession with unemployment rates that have risen to levels we have not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s both in California and in the United States. When that recession hit and when the job losses occurred, the companies became very lean with respect to their workers and their workforce. They also took advantage of technology, which has been partial of the economic story really for the past 30 years, beginning with the PC and going forward. As a result of that, they were able to repair their workforce and replace some of the functions with some kind of technology. Now that the economy is coming back, some of the jobs that used to be there are no longer there because of the displacement by technology. This goes back to the point touched on earlier that people have to be adaptable and have to be able to move in to the jobs of 2012 and 2013, which might well be different from the jobs of 2002 and 2003. Training is very important for these kinds of transitions from the job climate that existed ten years ago to the job climate we have today.

Bruce recently looked at a report that talked about rankings as far as business friendly states, and California was almost at the bottom of the barrel. Robert is in the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation having to attract people into an environment that you maybe did not create. In other words, Bruce wondered how you attract people to Los Angeles and Southern California for jobs in a negative environment and it has that reputation in place. This is indeed one of the challenges that we face across all of California, especially in Southern California, with the high cost of labor relative to other parts of the country. This also includes the high cost of other resources, not the least of which would be buildings and land. The perception, if not the reality is that there is a fair amount of red tape that one has to navigate in order to establish a business here. Fortunately, there are entities such as the LAEDC that provide assistance to employers who are interested in locating here to Southern California to help them work through that. The reputation that California has as not being a terribly friendly business state is certainly a hurdle to be overcome. This is something that is a long-term concern and has been a concern for a few decades; and it continues to be a challenge that we have to work on.

Bruce believes Texas might be the favored state and wondered why it is so different with them. Robert said that Texas has, among other things and from the workforce point of view, income tax at the state level and is also a right-to-work state. The presence of unions is not quite what it is here in the state of California and other states around the country. Their permitting and regulatory requirements are also not what they are here in California. When you are in the predicting business, you have to really pay attention to the whole country. Bruce stays up until midnight now seeing if Greece is going to default. It seems to be much more complicated than it ever has been. There is no doubt about the fact that our local economy is more closely tied to what is happening around the state and around the globe than it ever has been in prior years. To begin with, you take a look at things such as mortgage rates, which are determined in the global financial system. A problem in Greece, specifically their sovereign debt problem, will indeed cause difficulties for someone who is trying to finance the purchase of a new home or refinance a home. This is one example of how we are so much more integrated today as a global economy where local meets global in a way we did not really have to worry about or be concerned.

If you go back 40 years in the early 1970s or even the 1960s, which was not terribly long after World War II had ended, you would have seen that the U.S. economy was really the only economy that was untouched by World War II. Its infrastructure was in place, and it was the dominant economy around the globe. Over time it gave way as different economies and different countries rebuilt and then saw Germany and Japan and other economies that had been industrialized become re-industrialized and become more important players on the global scheme. You look at the 1980s, we had another wave of economies that have come onto the scene.

Tune in next week for the second part of Bruce’s interview with Robert Kleinhenz on The Norris Group Radio Show and be sure to visit our website, www.thenorrisgroup.com, for more information on trust deed investing and our loan programs.

For more information about The Norris Group’s California hard money loans or our California Trust Deed investments, visit the website or call our office at 951-780-5856 for more information. For upcoming California real estate investor training and events, visit The Norris Group website and our California investor calendar. You’ll also find our award-winning real estate radio show on KTIE 590am at 6pm on Saturdays or you can listen to over 170 podcasts in our free investor radio archive.

Craig Hill

Hard Money Lender for The Norris Group

(Full Bio)

This week Bruce is joined once again by Craig Hill of The Norris Group. Craig has worked with The Norris Group since the company opened in 1995. Craig has worked with the real estate investors, helping them access money for their deals and trust deed investors who want to get a very safe yield on their money. Prior to working with The Norris Group, Craig was in the hard money loan business for years prior to that; and the expertise he brought with him has proved him valuable to the success of the company.

Today’s radio show focuses on the borrower side of loans. Craig deals with calls all the time and goes through the terms of the loan, and there will be some callers who are connected to the advertisements of 4% and are completely shocked when Craig tells them it will be 12.5%. They do not understand this side of the world at all. However, Craig said these calls usually come from people who have never done it before, so usually whenever Craig gets into a situation like this he tries to ask them how they funded the last deal they did. You really have to establish that this is a different world, and if somebody has been a property buyer for a long period of time, they have a better understanding. Sometimes if you get that person who feels they can do it, it might be best for them to pursue a loan at their bank under a non-owner occupied program. Craig tells them they might be able to get it if they have perfect credit and other things. There are a lot of different ways to handle it, but Craig said The Norris Group usually deals with investors who do this for a living and have an understanding of what the costs are going to be.

The real education is to go ahead and try whatever you think is easier or less expensive because the lending world is really not working very well right now. Bruce worked with a major bank where the manager told him the frustration they have right now where they cannot fund owner-occupied loans inside of 75 days. In the investor world, if you do not have speed, you don’t find deals. They have to be able to close their loans quickly, and they have to rely on the fact that the deal will close. People are always asking how they can save money, so they either try to list the house themselves or find their own money source. People even hold seminars about how people can find their own money, but it is really not that easy. It is not that easy to get trusted with money. You always have to ask yourself whether it is really cheaper or not because there is always something attached to it, including a no answer when you thought you already had a yes. The Norris Group gets a lot of these kinds of calls where someone calls at the last minute and only has three or four days or less and they need to close it. Someone had told them something didn’t perform. It is so competitive out there now, so you have one loan that does not perform then you can forget about doing business with your agent again or anybody that agent knows. You have to see that this was really the cost of not getting a loan as it exceeded far the cost of getting one. It is not easy to watch over the years people going through a process of trust. As a person, to start from scratch is just not a reliable source.

Bruce came through the hard money business first as a borrower of considerable amount of money on a regular basis. He really did not consider the cost as onerous at all; he just needed access to it. With reliability comes the ability to grow. It’s the same way with The Norris Group business as a whole and just like how it is with an investor. If an investor has either his own money, such as a limited amount like $200, they really are working under constraints. Once they have access to somebody who might have, for example $1 million, they can start and tailor their business knowing they have access to $1 million. There is a cost to this, but you also have to look at the benefits of this. The benefits are you can up your marketing and do many more types of projects. It’s like being a construction lender without having a lender. A construction worker has to have some leverage, or he is only going to build ten homes. This has been the same way with The Norris Group; the borrower side has always grown along with the money side because the money side is there and the borrowers need the funds. This is what a hard money lender is.

When Bruce and Craig met, their meeting came about because Bruce was seeing more opportunities than he could personally handle. He had a fair amount of cash and a credit line, and all these were active on free and clear things. He had a chance to go to HUD auctions that were tossing out $.50 deals a half a dozen times per auction. He also had the chance to buy a track of homes at the same number. He looked around and saw how he could not take advantage of it, and this was the start of their meeting. When Bruce and Craig met, this was not the typical loan for a hard money loan business. It almost did not exist, and this was in about 1992 or 1993 when for hard money lenders the rule of thumb was a house was worth what you paid for it. If one next door sold for $100 that was fixed up, then you bought one that was exactly a model-match right next door for $50 or less, then you could borrow $30 or $40 on that one. At the same time, The Norris Group could lend somebody who had never made a payment $60 grand on the other one. When Bruce first came to Craig, he had to fight very hard to get the first few deals through because it was not done that way. Now, in a lot of ways hard money is synonymous with that exact function for investors. Back then, however, it did not even exist.

Bruce said he remembered for one of the properties he bought at a HUD auction that was appraised, they had not discussed what he had paid for it. He asked for it to go ahead and be appraised and would be able to borrow X-amount of percentage on the value. When Craig told Bruce the value, he asked Craig if it bothered him that he would be giving him money back more than he paid. The first thing Bruce thought of was they had a really unique opportunity there and Craig was probably dealing with his type of the world for the first time, and Bruce had access to a lot of dough for the first time. Bruce told Craig he could rest assured and made six payments on the first loans, and all of a sudden it dawned on the owner of the company that they had never had anybody do that prior, so they either understood that Bruce understood it or he was capable more than their other clients had been. This was an important transition for the hard money loan industry because it followed with Craig hoping there were more people like Bruce. Craig spent three or more years until he had all the other loan officers ask him when he thought it was going to be done. Some of them never transitioned into doing that and Craig strictly transitioned into doing only that because he got used to the facts from Bruce and others thinking the process was very efficient. They knew how to make the most happen with the least effort.

Bruce has always been surprised because he remembered thinking when 1995-97 passed and it was the end of the REO world, they were really thinking from where all the deals were going to come from, and they did. The private party purchasing and construction started, and all of a sudden The Norris Group was even busier. Craig said this has been the one important thing that there has always been a niche for good borrowers and private money. If good people are out there doing something and making a profit at it, whether it be buying off private parties or lots when the time is right, there is always an opportunity and a surprise that no matter what the real estate market is like, there is always a space for hard money loans. Bruce is so convinced about this now that he has had the chance to go back and rub shoulders with the people who make decisions in the normal world and see how they view investors. He came back with a self-assurance knowing there will always exist a need for a private loan business because we just make decisions that are common sense, yet the infrastructure prevents this. For example, The Norris Group is not afraid of a home that does not have a kitchen because they have dealt with 1,000 of them and have not been damaged by any of them because they know a kitchen can reemerge for a certain amount of money. In the loan process, they retain the money that would cause a kitchen to show up if the borrower stopped paying. You start putting the pieces of the safety together and think you can make the loan, but it does take private money to fund it quickly and accurately. Bruce does not think we are ever going to have a lot of competition from the other side.

Craig is amazed how much conventional lending will not do. There are so many hoops to go through, and the borrowers The Norris Group is loaning to have wealth and credit. They have everything where you think you can walk in and get any amount of loans you want, and they can’t even get loan #1. Craig received a call from a borrower not too long ago who owned about 4 houses free and clear for about $120-$140,000 each. This is his money he put into them, but the bank will not work with this because they consider it cash out. Craig wondered if he would be a stronger borrower if he leveraged at 100%. Here is somebody with perfect credit with four free and clear houses and the bank will not work with him because they see this as cash out. It does not make sense to him. Somehow this puts him in less of a safe position that he owes, for example, $200 grand at 50% and has $200 grand of liquidity to make sure it gets paid. This is a decision-maker you’re competing with and you think you will be okay. With The Norris Group on the other hand, their response is how quickly they can get their appraiser out there.

Some people are disappointed that there are more hoops than they thought. They attend a seminar and get told that hard money only looks at one thing, and then they go elsewhere like The Norris Group and see that this is not the case. They were not really told what was really going on. Because of the nature of loans and more recent history, Craig said one thing that is very difficult for people to understand is if you are brand new, it is very hard to delicate the whole process and think you are going to have a good result. You don’t even know how to protect yourself. This is the most frustrating thing Craig sees from some of the national seminars because it is almost like they are a part of a group and are dealing with a mentor, while The Norris Group takes a look at the deals and sees they are not deals. The number one thing The Norris Group wants is to make sure people have a deal, or they are going to talk them out of it. Bruce said this is an important thing for people to know that there are companies that are built that way and companies that are not. It has to go through some filters. If The Norris Group is going to make a loan on it, then there is probably a very high success rate for the investor.

There are several filters. For one, you might look at the sheer numbers and say it is not a deal, and then you have an appraiser who goes out with a lot of experience in investing and says that the numbers make sense but it is really a dangerous property for specific reasons. The filter The Norris Group has for people who borrow money from them is second to none. Bruce trusted himself and said he would actually have cause himself if he had found a deal. If someone like Rick Solis had gone out there and told him he really needed to take a second look, then he would. You really cannot put a value on this type of filter, and sometimes The Norris Group will get calls from people who are thinking of buying all cash, and Craig tells them to call him when they have their numbers. If they have something in escrow that they are thinking of doing, then they need to take a quick look at it because it is very easy to see where somebody can make a mistake.

For people who don’t have experience, they really don’t realize how expensive the journey will be, so there are surprises and repairs. All these things start taking away, whether it is a percentage here or there, and all of a sudden a deal at, for example, $.82 on the dollar that seems like it is going to make you a lot of money actually costs you a lot of money. If you get over 75% of what the house is worth in repairs and the purchase price, you are really starting to deal with a very thin margin. Craig will back out everything and start at 100%. He will ask them if they are going to sell it themselves or if they are going to have a commission, because now more people are paying incentives such as 2 or 3% of the closing cost. If you have something and then you have the cost of the loan, pretty soon they can see that what something is costing and being sold for is not leaving anything in the middle. You are going on a 6 month journey, and this is where the experience comes in. You are going to hire a construction crew you have never dealt with, and the odds of this not working out are higher than dealing with one you have dealt with twenty times. Everything that potentially goes wrong in the business is especially likely to occur to the first-time person. For that individual, having a deal is critical. The first step is the person needs to have a deal.

The second most frustrating thing for people is they really are told that they don’t need to have any money or need only a very little money. We are looking at things in terms of the borrower needs to have survivability and a successful outcome. Years ago Craig had a client who had a house and made payments like clockwork, then all of a sudden he stopped making payments. He called in and said he had a specific amount allocated for that, and Craig said it was quite a surprise. This was years ago; so more and more The Norris Group has had the philosophy that the really liquid cash is very important because it gives them survivability to only to protect The Norris Group and their investor, but it really protects their down payment and what they put into the property. It gives them the ability to get out of a situation instead of lose a situation. It is also really a benefit for them to make a monthly payment.

Craig has always been asked if the payments can be included in the loan, and he learned years ago from making an unwise transaction with his baseball cards that once the money was long gone he made payments on it every month. Every time he wrote the check it was a lesson to not do it again. In the same way, if you are making a payment on a property you realize that it is costing you money. Just because you might have payments for six months, you cannot just sit around and wait. You have to take action since the problem is not going to solve itself. The payments are either not a high priority or the borrower has a tendency to not think about making payments. The Norris Group used to do seconds for people so they would not have as much in, although this is something they do not do anymore. They realized that not everyone is disciplined. The Norris Group not only looks at the deals, but they also try to help people be disciplined so they have successful outcomes. You cannot try to do three if your limit really should be one. Stick with the one because you are really going to have a successful result on that one. One of Bruce’s favorite statements Craig has made is, “Lost another loan; made another client for life.” In this case, the client was told the truth they actually needed to hear to see that they now have confidence that they have a backup system they can trust and will not get hurt by their loan officer.

There is almost as many people out there who would thank The Norris Group for not doing deals, talking them out of a deal, or explaining how it works. It is very satisfying because what Craig tells people when he is talking to them is he can tell by their voice when they are a little disappointed, but he tells them he can deal with that. Being a little disappointed right now with Craig telling you no or what is the real deal is much better than the client having a deal three weeks from now where they are going to lose the deposit or having a deal nine months from now where you lost $20 grand. This is going to be a lot more disappointing. The philosophy at The Norris Group is to deal with it as it comes, and people are usually very appreciative of the fact that TNG tries to give them good advice.

Bruce mentioned the home shows and how one of the things he noticed was how frustrating they were because some of the reality was missing. On the show, you are shown a property in the beginning that needs a lot of repair. It’s a perfect opportunity for two investors, but then you come back four months later and they look like they want to get a divorce. Then, the realtor comes back in and tells them what they left out. Going from A to B is an expensive process, and it just shows there are deals that do not fit the level of experience of certain buyers. Craig always tells them when they get their first deal; he tells them they did not find the deal, it found them. There were several people who passed on that deal who were experienced investors, and the newer people need to stick with what they know and what is the simplest process. You have to leave the other things for the other people, and conversely in their group of clients they have a lot of clients who are experienced. They have one right now out in Orange County who is buying a property for $220,000 and are putting about $125 grand into it. This is a very experienced investor, but it is also a niche because not a lot of people are going to be able to accomplish what he is going to accomplish. You have two sides of the scale; one that can tackle these kinds of things, and the newer group that needs to stay away from this. Most often these are the deals that the new people find that other people had passed on originally.

Be sure to visit our website, www.thenorrisgroup.com, for more information on trust deed investing and our loan programs.

For more information about The Norris Group’s California hard money loans or our California Trust Deed investments, visit the website or call our office at 951-780-5856 for more information. For upcoming California real estate investor training and events, visit The Norris Group website and our California investor calendar. You’ll also find our award-winning real estate radio show on KTIE 590am at 6pm on Saturdays or you can listen to over 170 podcasts in our free investor radio archive.

Craig Hill

Hard Money Lender for The Norris Group

(Full Bio)

This week Bruce is joined by Craig Hill of The Norris Group. Craig has worked with The Norris Group since the company opened in 1995. Craig has worked with the real estate investors, helping them access money for their deals and trust deed investors who want to get a very safe yield on their money. Prior to working with The Norris Group, Craig was in the hard money loan business for years prior to that; and the expertise he brought with him has proved him valuable to the success of the company.

Bruce said it never ceases to amaze him that their client base keeps on finding deals that keep giving them record years. Craig said it seems that regardless of what you hear out there about there not being any deals, The Norris Group is very fortunate because they have wide enough base of clients that they seem to find enough properties to keep The Norris Group hitting record levels every year. They have an expert base of clients that finds things when most people don’t. Bruce has a feeling next year might be a blockbuster year and that there will be inventory in excess of what they had this year. Craig said for most of his clients, the perception ranges from no deals to a blockbuster year. Their base of clients, both buyers and trust deed investors, will be ready for whichever one it is.

The mood has definitely shifted, but at least now there is a safety in what people think has happened to prices. Craig thinks there is definitely not a huge issue with a large price drop, especially in the inventory with which The Norris Group is dealing. They are dealing in the starter homes, whether it is L.A., Orange County, Riverside, or San Bernardino. It is the lower priced homes. But Craig said people definitely do not see a sharp drop in the prices. This would be hard to imagine because when they deal with one of the long-term loans, it is not uncommon that the rents are 2x the interest payment. This is a 9.9% interest payment, not 4%. You would have to think there would be an interested buyer at some level. It is almost like with the investment side and the trust deed side, it is hard to imagine a real worst case. Craig had talked to a gentleman earlier who talked about how the only real issue is it would go from passive to a little less passive if you ever had a situation you had to deal with, but not something where you have a major loss of funds or would not have 2 or 3 solutions.

Back in 2007 and 2008 was not normal, it was really a Great Depression for real estate. It was hard to not get damaged somewhat in that, but for the ten years prior there are so many solutions, including the client base that deals with the inventory. When The Norris Group has one client that might have an individual problem, it seems to be easily resolved by multiple sources. Since a lot of the buyers concentrate in the same areas, Craig cannot imagine that if somebody were to get a house back or if a borrower was to have a problem that he would have any trouble finding somebody who would either take over the mortgage or take a similar mortgage on a house where it cash flows by twice of what the payment is. The Norris Group has had very few problems, but when they have they have had cooperation from the borrower. It seems like most of the time they are interested in a solution that does not force them to take it into foreclosure. The cooperation The Norris Group has had has been very fantastic.

The easiest case here would be if somebody wants to do a deed in lieu of foreclosure, this makes the process very simple. There have been a couple cases where someone has allocated a sale to another investor that then put the trust deed investor back on track receiving payments. A lot of things really come with the base of the clients that they have. The Norris Group has really grown to become the company it is today, and there are not a lot of people who want to burn that bridge. It is a lot of fun when you are associated with a company that has that reputation. Both Bruce and Craig receive the calls where people tell them they have heard of The Norris Group from so many different directions and want to know what they do. This is a fun phone call for them. The calls are definitely warm if not red-hot depending on how many times they have heard of Bruce Norris and The Norris Group. It is an advantage to take those calls. What is nice is there is no other place you can go to where they are treated the same way.

The concept of loaning money out to someone seems fairly simple. You find someone with a unique situation where normal lenders would not loan on it, so you step in, put up money, and get a higher interest yield. It sounds simple except for when people try to do it themselves. This is when the failure rate is astronomical. This is why they do loans and not situations because the situations are the dangerous ones. Their focus has always been on investors buying properties, so they really focus on doing loans. The people who only lend to people who have a situation, such as someone in foreclosure, currently do not have the ability to pay, or they would be paying. Therefore, somebody steps in and thinks they are protected by the equity and if they give a certain amount, such as $30 grand, then everything will be okay. However, what happens is that $30 grand has a home probably 5 minutes after you give it to them. Now you are dealing with the only security you have, which is the property. You really cannot rely on the borrower to make you good because he really could not make payments before you met him, and now he has all the payments plus The Norris Group’s payment, and the $30 grand did not really solve the problem the way the customer thought it would. If you are protected by the property, then this is a situation where you can be tied up by the borrower with litigation; and this has never been something The Norris Group wanted to do.

The word Craig uses more than anything because it applies to how he feels as an investor is passive. Their group of investors really gets spoiled by the passive nature. When they first started, the investors at the beginning felt like the company was a big warehouse filled with loans. People were asking for loans that were, for example, $200,000 more than what they originally asked. For a long time this may have worked because they were growing as the money base was growing, but then when the market got a little more difficult, they really backed off on the number of loans they did. Unfortunately, this was when clients found out it was not a warehouse, but rather a process. The clients went elsewhere thinking the process would be the same and they were drawing the loans from the same warehouse, but unfortunately this was where a lot of people got hurt. They have had so many people who want to invest, and Craig has had to tell people they will never change their criteria, no matter how many people want to lend money through The Norris Group. It is better for them to be a little disappointed than for The Norris Group to change their process.

What people have to understand is The Norris Group spends no time on negative situations in relationship to a lot of other companies. A lot of companies have foreclosure divisions, and Bruce said he just cannot imagine the stress of this. Earlier in the year, they did have a house that went all the way through foreclosure that was 600-700 loans in the past. This is something Craig can deal with; but when you are dealing with loans from 2 or 3 years ago and you have only had one, then it makes things a little more difficult. As a business model it is very good because they are spending all of their energy on positive things, such as new programs and ways to service people better and fund deals more quickly. It really helps the Norris Group do a better job too because when everyone is making their payments on time, the base of investors who have trust deed investments feel safer to make more quick decisions saying that what they have is just like the one they had originally. Craig said he sometimes wishes he were like the Ghost of Christmas Present when dealing with the new investor and show them how a deal had worked out originally and what they could do this time. Unfortunately you can’t, so it is understandable for new people. Everybody is new at something at some point, but usually with the success and consistency of things, everybody wants to get in and they’re only frustrated by the fact that maybe The Norris Group does not have enough loans for everybody.

Sometimes we get into situations where there are multiple decision-makers, a lawyer, and there was even one incident they dealt with where it was trumped by somebody who had a bad sense about the investment, and the investment they put in has not worked out. You can go a year out and look back to see how you really liked the decision you made. This is one thing that is a hard decision for people because sometimes they just have the wrong perception because hard money for years has been tied to people lending to people in situations Craig had talked about earlier, and it is not real easy for them to separate that somebody may actually have a different process. On the surface, with interest rates are 4% and the Norris Group is loaning at 12.5%, the borrower has to be risky; and his is not. It almost does not make sense. Interestingly enough, you have two groups of people, some who think they can do better with their own money and can get a 15-20% yield, and others who are completely the opposite and are earning under a percent in a CD and when they look at a yield of 9% think the money is being taken to Vegas. Whenever somebody comes into the office, he always shows them a list of all the 9% loans they have. He shows them how they have not had to foreclose on any and only might occasionally have a couple that are 30 days late. It is real comforting to know that on any given day he can have somebody in the office he can show his computer to and not be embarrassed.

Bruce also discussed the time he had the opportunity to speak in front of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac about the safety of loaning to investors. At that time we had a pool of $15 million loans with absolutely no late payments, and he said you could see the look of shock on their faces that there could be a 9.9% interest rate and no late payments. It was so out of the box of their thinking because they were looking at the investor as the risky borrower as opposed to the owner-occupant, and The Norris Group has found just the opposite to be true. This is why they have always pushed the envelope on the yield vs. risk side. They have never been the highest in yield to an investor, but they have always been by far the less risky. Sometimes people ask Craig if he could lend a little less or try to custom-fit the program, and Craig always responds that what they have to realize is this is a very given and take situation because if we want to continue to have the absolute best clients, we have to be on the cutting edge. It has to make sense for both sides, but The Norris Group cannot make it to where it absolutely does not make sense because what happens is instead of getting the A quality borrowers that they are filled with, they have to start fighting for lower than this. They always have to keep the clients they have because this is what makes them successful.

The type of people who always want to chase the higher yield is interesting because Bruce has had the same conversation with them where you finally figure out that they are in fact getting a higher yield and are foreclosing on 50% of their properties while they have 20% of their money active. The active part is really the key because Craig has had conversations with people year by year, and they just cannot pull the trigger. One instance might be the 9% program because it is an 8 year program. They think they are going to be looking at a higher interest rate and more nervous about committing their money. They will call Craig a year later, and he will finally tell them that for two years they have not been getting any yield, so going forward it would really have to obtain a yield. You really can’t take riskier investments or wait for some kind of better yield, especially someone who has wealth already. Sometimes it may not be a good fit for somebody that has to create wealth.

Craig was having dinner with a client recently who had been with them a long time, and she had somebody she knew who came up to Craig and asked him how they could make $1 million. He said he could not tell her how to do it, but if you try to do it you might lose $1 million. Sometimes not everybody is a fit for everybody, so they have really found a nice niche for people who have some wealth and want to consistently build it with very low risk. With the price points we are at right now, we are making loans based on 1990’s prices. Common sense tells all of us that that was before it even went up this last time. If we feel that 1995 was a realistic value, these loans are being made at 60-65% of 1995 prices. All that tells us is historically we would not know what would have to happen for this to make sense and it also does in a second way because the rents are already covering the payment by double. It is one of those situations where the smart money is actually on both sides of the table because the investor, or the person buying the property, is a skillful investor buying something below market by today’s value. However, if you look at the whole picture the investor is buying it with a starting point of half of what it was worth four years ago, and he is receiving a discount and a cash flow. He is making money monthly and buying something below replacement cost where the history says we will probably accelerate in the future. He cannot borrow money through standard lenders because they are not interested in that loan. On the other side, he has the choice of receiving a ten year t-bill that is at 1.9% today, the stock market that goes down or up 300 points every other day based on what happens in Greece, or a 9% trust deed. ]

The Norris Group has some very large commitments from people, who have money managers and overseers, and from talking to these people one year apart Bruce has seen that they are astonished that their yield had performed perfectly. They were warning their client that there is no way that the yield could be so riskless, and then it turned out to be so. The best and most satisfying thing about what The Norris Group does is what they see happen in the long-term. Before going to The Norris Group, Craig was working with a friend and was funding deals with hers and her father’s funds. She told him a story about how she went to her account year after year for 6-8 years in a row. Craig told her he did not know what her investment was but she needed to get out of it because it was too risky. Meanwhile, with her father’s insistence she has also diversified into some stocks, which had netted a 0 yield over the last 18 years. However, by the ninth or tenth year she was told to keep doing what she was doing. It was very rewarding. The Norris Group has a process in place that is second-to-none in picking clients that are worthy of borrowing money.

Bruce and Craig talked about the process and why it was different from other people. The main thing you have to do is rule out people to make sure they are qualified when you get a call from a borrower. The first thing you do is try to establish right away whether or not it is a situation. If it is a situation, then you have to rule that out. Secondly, you always try to find out if it is owner occupied. Most hard money companies will not do owner-occupied loans any longer, so you also look at this. You also have to get an idea and see if they have any experience. The Norris Group really relies heavily on liquid cash because one thing they have found in the business is you really need to have liquid cash because you cannot have a situation where a $10,000 or $20,000 problem throws your whole world upside down. This is probably the most frustrating thing when somebody calls in to borrow, they might have $800 credit but only $10,000 in the bank. You can usually tell by their credit report and what they state their income is to see that it would not take much to flip the whole thing over. This is compared with someone who is a business person who went through a situation 4-5 years ago where he had a bankruptcy and so his credit is not as good. However, he currently has about $200,000 in the bank to back him up. People with better credit don’t like to hear this, but in our world this is a safer bet.

When we make loans, we are actually using common sense and asking ourselves what are the odds that we are going to be paid monthly and get paid back. We are really not guided by any 1,2,3,4 rules. The bottom line is if it really makes sense and it is a good loan, then it can be done. Bruce said that Craig also has kind of a sixth sense in that there are times when he has come to Bruce showing him something that looked good on paper, but he knew there was something about it that he felt uncomfortable with, and he was right. This was probably one of the things that he has always appreciated from the very start, whether it was from a trust deed investor or a borrower. There will be times when he will come to Bruce, and he can just feel that there is something not right. Craig has learned that he if gets that feeling to try to catch somebody in a little bit of a situation where he can tell they are not being up front with him.

Tune in next week for the second part of Bruce’s interview with Craig Hill on The Norris Group Radio Show.

For more information about The Norris Group’s California hard money loans or our California Trust Deed investments, visit the website or call our office at 951-780-5856 for more information. For upcoming California real estate investor training and events, visit The Norris Group website and our California investor calendar. You’ll also find our award-winning real estate radio show on KTIE 590am at 6pm on Saturdays or you can listen to over 170 podcasts in our free investor radio archive.

Robert Stowe England

Author and Financial Journalist

(Full Bio)

This week Bruce is joined once again by Robert England. Robert is a journalist and author who has written extensively on mortgage finance, banking, retirement policy, and the financial and economic impact of aging population. His most current work is Black Box Casino: How Wall Street’s Risky Shadow Banking Crashed Global Finance. Previous works include Aging China: The Demographic Challenge to China’s Economic Prospects. Robert is also a senior writer for Mortgage Banker Magazine.

In our minds, we used to think that we would go to the bank, get a loan, make a payment to them until we paid it all off, then they hold the loan the whole time. This was called a portfolio loan. It was not until late 2007 when Bruce heard the term mortgage-backed security and CDO. Bruce wondered if, therefore, at the time this was commonly understood by people who were even in the loan business. Did they understand the path the paper took and how it was disseminated? Robert believes the people involved with mortgage originations understood it, although other people involved in the housing sector probably did not understand it as much. They did not understand that the loans were being put into portfolios while securities were being issued against the portfolio so that investors were the ultimate funders of the mortgage loans and not banks. The money was funded temporarily by the mortgage originator. They would obtain a warehouse line of credit from a bank if they were an actual mortgage banker as opposed to a broker. They would have money just to the point that the loan closed, and then the loan was sold to an investor. For the mortgage originator, the investor was either Fannie or Freddie or a bank that was acquiring the loan. They did not really know what happened to the loan after that. They did not have to know this; they only knew that they were creating loans, and the demand for them kept increasing even though the quality was decreasing.

Out of the mortgage-backed security world came a product called a CDO. This is a collateralized debt obligation, which began to be used as early as the 1980s. It was used to take existing corporate debt and roll it into a pool of loans to issue securities against a pool of corporate bonds. This never became a huge amount of business and was tried later for bonds from developing nations and other kinds of debt instruments. The market would rise and fall and vanish away, so someone was always trying to come up with another way to use a CDO, which is just another form of securitization. The 1999 credential came up with the idea of having a CDO that put together mortgage-backed securities into a pool and issued securities against those securities, so you were securitizing securities.

There was also the concept of a traunch, which Bruce thought was brilliant and a good vehicle if done correctly. In the private-label mortgage-backed securities world, they all had traunches even before the CDO, and every deal had as much of the deal as possible set up as AAA rated. These were credit-rating traunches. About 94% of most MBS deals were AAA rated by the credit rating agencies, such as Moodys and Fitch. They were paid fees to buy the Wall Street firms, and they also rated the CDOs. The huge volume of private mortgage-backed securities and CDOs did not really take off until after 1999. The reason for this was when the committee for banking supervision came up with a concept for having the idea risk-waited capital standards apply to these kinds of financial instruments and to give the credit-rating agencies a job of determining their credit rating, only then did it determine the amount of capital banks would hold against the traunches of the deals. The central bankers never really thought this through and were actually creating a monster here because by giving this role to the credit rating agencies, they had made a big mistake. Ironically, when the idea was first proposed, Moodys Investor Service wrote a letter in response to the proposal and suggested that it not be done and that it would corrupt the credit rating standards and created a moral hazard. Yet, this was ignored, and the various countries, including the United States, adopted the standards in 2001 that gave the credit rating agencies this role.

The same year there was a Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act that also did away with the last of the Glass-Steagall Act and barred the SEC from regulating the investment banking holding companies. The investment banking companies, which were already independent, did not have a prudential regulatory regime since Gramm–Leach–Bliley cast this in stone. There was a battle subsequently with the Europeans over this, and Congress first passed a law allowing a voluntary regulatory regime to be established for the bank holding companies and investment banking firms. All of the banking regulation was based on the idea that banks have deposits, taxpayers are exposed to deposits, and banks hold assets for a long time and therefore we are protecting the taxpayers from losses. However, investment banks do not hold deposits and by the nature of their business should not be holding assets for a very long time but rather should create markets. By adopting a regulatory regime in 2004, the bank holding companies and investment companies were given the incentive to buy and hold assets and the use of tremendous leverage, especially mortgage-backed securities. Risk-weighted capital standards are supposed to discourage banks from picking on assets with high risk, but what they really did was create incentives for banks to take on assets with low capital ratings. The investment banking firms did the same things that banks were doing, which were loading up on the assets.

The money to fund the CDOs came from investors, and it had to rated AAA to attract a lot of money. Two things were going on in the early days of the CDO. There were institutional investors who invested in the CDOs that contained mortgage-backed securities and subprime. Banks were also creating CDOs to get the lower-rated traunches of mortgage-backed securities off their books. They could not sell them, but they were trying to get rid of them, so they would put them into CDOs so it would become AAA rated. The institutional investors had lost interest in the lower-rated traunches of the private-labeled mortgage-backed securities subprime, particularly around 2003. The CDO was a way to recycle those assets that institutions would not buy by turning them into AAAs. You would basically take the worst from one pile, and it magically turned into the new pile of the best. By making it very opaque, some investors who did not understand it could be enticed into investing. These were actually black boxes.

Most of the investors aforementioned were foreign investors. After 2003, the U.S institutional investors were not buying, and the investors who were willing to buy had incentive to buy dollar assets and were looking for bond assets. They had trade surpluses or recycled petro dollars. They had lots of dollar denominated funds, and they needed to invest them in dollar assets in order to avoid currency risks. Therefore, the Asian and European banks and other institutional investors were buying these CDOs without much regard for what was in it, and you could not really know what was in it. They did not quite get the level of risk that was there because they were rated AAA.

Bruce wondered what role the Credit Default Swap played in the world of CDOs. Robert said the Credit Default Swap is a form of insurance in which one side sells credit protection against the bonds or mortgage backed securities that the payments would be made, and the other side buys the insurance. The availability of credit default swap made it possible to create synthetic CDOs on a massive scale beginning around 2005. They had existed before, and people were buying credit default swaps to protect their risks for owning certain traunches of the mortgage-backed securities. They then applied this concept to the CDO, but the synthetic CDO was created entirely with credit default swap. The actual assets were a pool of credit default swaps, and the entity issuing the synthetic CDO was insuring their performance. They would turn around and try to get insurance that would cover their losses if the bonds or notes failed. The provider of that was AIG’s financial products division, which sold all the protection for many years.

There were other companies that did it as well, but not nearly the size. The mono-line bond insurance companies that were looked over by state regulators became involved to their own detriment. When they went out of business, whoever was supposed to obtain the insurance coverage just lost. What happened was the issuers such as Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup were putting together synthetic CDOs and were providing the insurance. In turn, they often could not buy the insurance. Goldman Sachs was able to, but Merrill Lynch and Citigroup increasingly were not able to buy the protection and continued to put together synthetic CDOs without it. They were the designated back holder at that point. They ended up owning all the super senior traunches, which is part of the deal that is made up of the credit default swaps. Citigroup tried to hide these assets on their balance sheet as well as their trading accounts. When the investment banking regulation was adopted, the Wall Street firms obtained a provision that allowed them to model anything held in their trading account on their book if it had not traded recently. However, Citigroup was also putting these assets into structured investment vehicles, which are more black boxes off its balance sheet. These were funded with asset-backed commercial paper, which was then backed in some cases by subprime mortgages. The Citigroup had over $50 billion worth of toxic assets at the time of the crisis. They were telling the public they had practically no subprime exposure.

Usually the person holding the credit default swap had the other side of the transaction, but this was not even necessary to get a credit default swap. One person was buying protection, and the other was selling. Merril Lynch was putting together a deal where they were providing credit protection to the other party that was in the deal. Then, someone such as Kyle Bass comes in and says he can buy, Bruce wondered if he could invest in a credit default swap and not have the other side. Robert responded you can in that you would only take one side, in this case the protection side. You can also bet against some of the various parts of the deal, which is what the hedge funds did. The smart people were buying the protection, and the less smart people were not. The general public did not realize how many bad loans were out there, including investors. They assumed that the deals would function and people would pay their mortgages. They did not see the dangers. However, those with the hedge funds did see the dangers and began to sponsor CDOs in order to create traunches they could bet against. They were selling a product they knew was going to fail, and then they bet against its failure. This was at least what was alleged with Goldman Sachs and the deal that got so much attention in Congress.

What the hedge funds did was slightly different, and it is not clear the extent to which the investment banking firms knew about it or whether the people at the top knew about it. Hedge funds would sponsor CDOs, and they would buy the equity traunch. The banks would then have to sell the AAA and BBB to someone else. There were CDO managers, and the catch funds were not supposed to influence the choice of assets that went into the CDO. That was how investors were assured that this was done with integrity. However, certain hedge funds appeared to influence, but it cannot entirely be proved because it was done in ways where it was difficult to trade. Very often with certain hedge funds, such as Magna Tar based in Chicago, the deals they sponsored and the $50 billion worth of CDOs all failed spectacularly. The CDO managers picked the worst assets out there. The question is whether Merrill Lynch in this case knew what was going on, and this is still going through litigation. Logically, you would think that they had to know something. The people at the top were probably the ones who did understand what was going on at the time. Interestingly, it seems to happen where they may not even understand completely the concepts that are emerging constantly.

You wonder about someone like Stanley O’Neal, who was supercharging at Merrill Lynch the CDO business at the worst possible moment because they thought it was very lucrative. You have to wonder if they were really that foolish and unaware. It is hard to know.

In Robert’s book, it talks about one trader who actually earned more doing one trade than for what Bear Stearns was sold. Bruce wondered if he used a naked short sale to achieve this. Robert said he did and that naked short selling was almost impossible to do with the uptick rule. You could still do naked short selling, but it was difficult to execute. An uptick means that stock has to rise and move up before it goes back down again. The naked short selling is selling shares of stock that you do not own or borrow. This is illegal and is done to manipulate markets to achieve outcomes that the manipulator desires to do. In March 2008, somebody bought an option for $1.7 million that would not pay off unless the chair price at Bear Stearns collapsed within ten days. Immediately after this happened, rumors were circulated throughout the industry that Bear Stearns did not have enough cash even though it had $18 billion in cash. Brokerage firms started pulling their money out of Bear Stearns. Within days, they only had $2 billion in cash and were on the verge of collapse. Over the Bear Stearns weekend in March 2008, the sale of Bear Stearns was negotiated by the Fed. In the initial deal, which was only $2 a share, the person who made the $1.7 million bet made $270 million off the bet. The company was sold for $236 million, which was worth less than the corporate headquarters of Bear Stearns.

Bruce read a quote that stated, “Bear Stearns was vulnerable to runs because, like most of Wall Street, it had been funding its operation from short-term secured and unsecured cash. When these short-term arrangements did not roll over, new arrangements could not be secured. Cash was drained out of the firm.” We now have sovereign debt. In his book Boomerang, Kyle Bass has done his job of doing credit default swaps on Greece. He would pay $1100 for $1 million coverage. Bruce wondered if Robert saw the same setup that really damaged the world’s economic mortgages done and if round 2 might be sovereign. This derives from the same problem with giving assets too low a risk waiting, especially in Europe where soverance requires no euro capital. Originally this was supposed to apply to AAAs and AAs, and in fact it does still apply to lower rated traunches. You could own a lot of these assets and fund them through overnight lending, and confidence in the system would vanish and people would want their cash back. They would demand more and more assets. Effectively, the price of the asset was declining, but it was being affected by cash being drained out of the system.

For more information about The Norris Group’s California hard money loans or our California Trust Deed investments, visit the website or call our office at 951-780-5856 for more information. For upcoming California real estate investor training and events, visit The Norris Group website and our California investor calendar. You’ll also find our award-winning real estate radio show on KTIE 590am at 6pm on Saturdays or you can listen to over 170 podcasts in our free investor radio archive.

Robert Stowe England

Author and Financial Journalist

(Full Bio)

This week Bruce is joined by Robert England. Robert is a journalist and author who has written extensively on mortgage finance, banking, retirement policy, and the financial and economic impact of aging population. His most recent work is Black Box Casino: How Wall Street’s Risky Shadow Banking Crashed Global Finance. Previous works include Aging China: The Demographic Challenge to China’s Economic Prospects. Robert is also a senior writer for Mortgage Banker Magazine.

Bruce said he really appreciated his Black Box Casino book and was familiar with the overall story. There are a lot of insider terms where when you are in Wall Street and you watch Squawk Box, they use the terms as if the world knows what they mean when they don’t. One thing his book really did that was very helpful was every time he had one of these words to use, he took time to explain what it means. Robert said he did this after a copy editor was reviewing his work that had a general but no financial background, so she kept saying she did not know what something meant. Since she did not understand what words meant, then Robert decided that he needed to define the term. Bruce said it was really helpful because there are some things you hear and you just pretend you know, but then you realize when you have to explain it to somebody that you really don’t know what it means.

The book talks about events as they unfolded in 2007 and 2008, yet Robert had just written the book in 2011. The reason for the long gap of time was it took a while for him to find a publisher who was interested and also to obtain a book contract. This was part of the reason. Another reason was information came out later on that was more helpful than what was available immediately after the crisis. This included a lot of research that was dug up by the financial crisis. Bruce wondered if as time passed people were more apt to say what really went on because there was a safety of distance between the events. Robert said this was probably true for some sources in the book; but for other sources they clammed up because whatever they had been involved with was being embroiled in lawsuits, so they did not really want to talk.

The name Black Box Casino is a concept that describes the change that was occurring in the global financial system. First, there was the increasing prevalence of black boxes within the system, which are financial instruments and institutions that have no transparency; you can’t see what is going on inside and therefore they are black boxes. The casino part of the title comes from learning that much of the activity that went on in a number of the black boxes was in fact speculation, even wild speculation.

Bruce said when we used to think of Fannie and Freddie; we used to think of the safest possible loan pool with a mandate to keep safety as first priority. Bruce wondered how wrong this perception is, to which Robert said this is completely 180 degrees from the reality that was going on at Fannie and Freddie. The way the regulation was set up to govern Fannie and Freddie did not guarantee that they would be operated in a safe and sound manner, and it may in fact have encouraged them to do the opposite.

Bruce wondered if the title of GSE (Government Sponsored Enterprises) came with benefits. Robert said it does because the government is sponsoring what you do, yet you are a private corporation that has shares that are publicly traded and that benefit the executives of the company if they can use the public mission of the corporation to increase revenues and profits for themselves. It is a hybrid form of a business that comes with a lot of problems and can reap a lot of damage if things get out of hand.

Bruce also wondered if the political club had considerable political clout. Robert said they did because both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had a considerable amount of clout in the beginning before the regulations were set up to govern them. Once the regulations were put in place, there were a number of provisions in the regulations and the statutes that gave them a lot of power. For one thing, they were allowed to lobby and also got involved with making campaign contributions. Even though they were government-sponsored enterprises, logically they should not have been allowed to lobby the government. What happened was by giving them the authority to lobby, or more specifically not prohibiting it, it allowed them to make contributions, influence Congress, and give politicians a way to provide benefits to constituents without having to go through the budgeting process since everything going on at Fannie and Freddie was not involving the budget. Even their regulator was given minimal powers to regulate them, keep them in line; and this in turn gave them more clout. The regulator did not have a source of income from fees, which is usually what the banking regulators have. Instead, they had to go to Congress every year and get funding for their activities; so they were hamstrung by the ways that the law was set up.

This law was the 1992 Federal Housing Enterprise Financial Safety and Soundness Act, which was a very important law but that unfortunately did not live up to its billing. It was supposed to have been set up for safety and soundness, but once Congress got a hold of the original idea and began devising a bill, it was really put together in a way that would benefit politicians the most as it would give them a way to constantly provide a benefit to a constituency, and that benefit would constantly rise over time. There was no way to restrain the lowering of lending standards, which would be required to increase the level of lending to designated populations.

The law contained federal affordable housing provisions, which was a kind of coup for the politicians. Bruce was shocked that they had a mandate they had to loan to low-to-moderate income people a certain percentage of their loans. When the GSE Act was being put together, at that point both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had informal goals in place where approximately 30% of their business would be acquiring loans that went to borrowers who were low or moderate income borrowers. That reflected on natural market share or an entity in their position that would not distort the market. The crafters of the legislation wanted to give HUD the right to raise the affordable housing goals that were put into law and to do them on a periodic basis along with constantly raising them without any consideration to whether or not it would impair the safety and soundness of Fannie and Freddie.

What is interesting about all of this is the legislation really came on just after the SNL crisis, so you would think that everyone would be in the mood to create something that was safe and sound. Robert believes everyone was in the mood, but no one was paying attention to what was being done. First of all, the concept that you would now securitize loans would be a predominant way to finance mortgages was thought to be the way they would reduce the potential fallout from a bad period of lending that occurred with the savings and loans, which held their mortgages on their book. When interest rates rose very high, there was a huge mismatch between their assets and liabilities, which did them in. Securitization was supposed to take that risk off the book, but starting with that people thought they had a magic solution. However, they did not put together a regulatory regime that would be capable of assuring the safety and soundness of Fannie and Freddie, from setting up capital standards to allowing them to have investments in portfolio, to not allowing the safety and soundness regulator to raise their capital standards if they deemed that they were inadequate at any point. In addition to having to go to Congress every year for money, the regulator was also not an independent regulator. They were a part of HUD, and they did not have any control over the Affordable Lending Goal and could do nothing about them. HUD did not have to consider safety and soundness when they were considering the goal. There were actually three goals at the time, and the main goal was raised to over 55% by the time of the crisis, so there was a subsequent goal to low income households, which is more narrowly targeted. This had not existed before and began at about 11% and rose to nearly 27% at the time of the crisis.

Bruce wondered how people qualified for the loans, whether they were really subprime or if they were good credit but low income. Robert said over time the lending standards at Fannie and Freddie declined in order to meet the affordable lending goals. As the goals were put in place gradually, they weakened their lending standards. They first lowered the down payment then gradually lowered the FICO score for borrowers to qualify to be part of the Fannie and Freddie program. They then increased the segment of the business that was funding subprime without identifying that publicly. They drastically increased the amount of business funding Alternative A or low to no documentation loans even more without publicly acknowledging it. The legislation that set up Fannie and Freddie did not require them to file quarterly audited statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission, so they could get away with not telling investors the truth about their portfolio. By the time of 2000, they were doing 100% loan-to-value mortgages and were greatly expanding their subprime lending, but it was never identified as that. This was how we ended up this past week with the SEC filing charges against former Fannie and Freddie executives for lying about the amount of subprime and Alt-A in their portfolios and in their investment holdings. They had a black box, and they were wildly at odds with the actual amount they had.

Bruce wondered if a lot of the fulfillment of the lower income goals happened because they were able to invest in mortgage-backed securities that had the loans in them. Robert said it was both through acquiring them and not calling them subprime, and also through buying private label mortgage-backed securities that had loans that met the qualifications and that would meet the goals. Jim Lockhart, the former head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, told Robert in a recent interview that they could not have met their goals if they had not bought up a lot of the private label mortgage-backed securities. They bought large amounts of it and were the major purchaser of private MBS. Another reason may have been they were able to leverage it more. Their capital standards were very low, so they could leverage the acquisitions and increase their earnings as well as buy extensions, which was the compensation of the top executives. As a lot of people may know, the former heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were involved in accounting scandals in 2003 and 2004 where they were found to have manipulated the earnings targets to maximize their compensation. Both Franklin Raines and Leeland Brendsel had to leave the two GSEs at the time. You can jut up the amount of securities you purchase to increase your overall compensation and profitability that was at first profitable but later was not. By creating a compensation system that rewarded the executives by increasing volumes, it really drove the GSEs’ top executives to greatly expand their business in order to make more money.

The leverage for a mortgage-backed security that was stated in the books was 222 to 1, and this was for the guarantee. There were two capital rules. The first was the 222 to 1 guarantee, and the second was Fannie and Freddie had to only hold 0.45% of that capital against the guarantee of paying the principle interest to the investors in their securities. If they held any of the securities that they purchased, they only had to hold 2.5% capital against it. By early 2008, the GSEs were leveraged about 100 to 1 overall when you blend the two on standard accounting rules. The accounting rules were another way that Fannie and Freddie were able to get away with what they did. They did not have to meet what were normally considered bank accounting rules but could use generally accepted accounting principles, which allowed them to use some types of securities and assets to count as their capital when other people did not. This included losses that could be claimed against future taxes. When you are losing money constantly, there is no gain to apply the losses against.

The intended consequences of lowering lending standards was to increase homeownership rates among lower-income and moderate-income households. The homeownership rate was around 64-65% at the time that the GSE Act was passed, and they were hoping to raise it dramatically so that particularly minorities would have homeownership rates similar to those of whites. There was a disparity between both African-Americans and whites and Hispanics and whites in terms of the percentage of the population that owned a home. Although the homeownership rates were about 45%-50% range, they were better than a lot of people might have thought. However, they were not in the mid to high 60s. There was legislation in the 70s that tried to correct those things. This included the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 that required the banks to collect data on which the person was that was the borrower as far as race. There was also the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 against Red Lining.

When you are a lender, there are areas where you are not trying to be prejudice but you realize that an appraiser could literally get shot. Bruce is in the hard money business, and they get asked to go to certain areas to do loans; and all those things come into play that you are actually in danger. With Red Lining, the intent was not to have a prejudice outcome, which is just and fair; but you have to ask if it also takes away the ability to say no because you know it is not going to have a good outcome. The effect of all the various laws, provisions, and actions by regulators led banks and lenders to increasingly divorce the decision on whether or not to get the mortgage from hard realities of what lending is all about. At some point, in order to meet their Community Reinvestment Act targets, banks made loans they knew were going to be bad because they thought they had to do it to stay in business. The CRE Act originally required banks to make efforts to reach targeted populations but did not require that specific results be achieved. The Clinton Administration reinterpreted that law and rewrote the regulation regarding it in the mid-1990s and said that they actually had to show results. The Federal Reserve began to reject applications for mergers and opening branches to banks that did not have the Homeowner Disclosure Act data that was collected on lending by race, gender, and income. These steps taken by regulators had the effect of forcing banks to make bad loans. A common criticism against people who make claims that the CRE Act has an impact on lending is that it was passed in 1997 and the crisis was in the 2000s. The whole process was very gradual, and the idea of forcing banks to do lending against solid lending principles came into play in the mid 1990s. As each merger was made and came about in the years following 1995, the banks had to make a commitment to do a certain amount of CRE lending. By 2007, they had made commitments of over $4 trillion. If you go back to the mid 1990s, the CRE lending might be $50 billion inconsequential. In the end, it was trillions of dollars that the commitment had to be made.

There is a quote that states, “The GSE Act became the vehicle for putting forth the philosophical view that housing is the civil right,” which basically states that people are entitled to own a house. Major provisions of the act was written by a group of housing advocates and activists under an informal deputization by Henry Gonzales, who was the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee in the early 1990s. These housing activists’ attorneys got together and crafted this language to achieve the goals and make housing more of a right and to impose that idea on lending. These are the same groups that are pointing out the loan programs and saying they were unfairly skewed to people of color and lesser income. They are now rewriting history and saying that lenders deliberately went out of the way to make bad loans, and therefore they are to blame instead of the rules, regulations, and laws. Because they were seemingly able to hide in the black box, not many people really understood the mandate underneath the covers that it was something Fannie and Freddie had to do. There was not much exposure to what was being proposed and put into law in the early 1990s. A lot of people thought it was just guaranteeing everyone equal access to credit and not steering it.

Tune in next week as Bruce and Robert England continue their discussion on the black box and real estate market

For more information about The Norris Group’s California hard money loans or our California Trust Deed investments, visit the website or call our office at 951-780-5856 for more information. For upcoming California real estate investor training and events, visit The Norris Group website and our California investor calendar. You’ll also find our award-winning real estate radio show on KTIE 590am at 6pm on Saturdays or you can listen to over 170 podcasts in our free investor radio archive.

Carolina Reid

Senior Researcher at the Center for Responsible Lending

(Full Bio)

This week Bruce is joined once again by Carolina Reid. Carolina joined the Center for Responsible Lending in August 2011 as a senior researcher working out of the Center’s California office. Before coming to CRL, Carolina served as the research manager for the Community Development Department for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. At the Fed, she published a substantial number of journal articles, working papers, and policy reports on the Community Reinvestment Act, the Foreclosure Crisis, Access to Credit, the role of anti-predatory lending laws. She also helped build the capacity of local stakeholders, including banks, nonprofits, and local governments, to undertake community development activities, especially in the area of affordable housing.

In their last interview, Bruce and Carolina had just broached on the subject of the need for a down payment. Shelia Bair stated as she was leaving office, “If people put down 20%, it makes perfect sense that they are going to have a better payment history.” Based on that assumption, we’re going down the road of Dodd-Frank and making it mandatory for a 20% down payment before we’re able to receive the best rate loan. Bruce believes the timing of this is disastrous. Shelia agreed, and she also does not think that 20% down payment is necessary in order to ensure that borrowers stay in their homes and receive responsible loan products. Carolina said they have a history of providing no down payment or very low down payment loans with very high success rates. The questions are how you underwrite these loans, what kind of product features do these loans have, and if you have really considered the borrower’s ability to repay the loan over the long term. There is evidence from city programs and state affordable housing programs and other programs like the Community Advantage Program, which has run out of self-help and is affiliated with CRL and a CRA motivated lending program and has very low foreclosure rates. We have also seen the aforementioned in an FHA loan, although historically FHA foreclosure rates have been slightly higher than the market overall. Over this most recent time period, they have actually performed quite well compared to the Alt-A and the negative amortization as well as the other risky loan products that were originated during the subprime boom.

Bruce believed they were probably not a big participant in the years that Carolina covered. In California they would have been non-existent, but they are certainly going to have their fair share of 2009 foreclosures. The deal is not so much the down payment as much as the negative equity, which has not really been discussed. The majority of the country’s problems are really located in areas that had ridiculous prices rises and then ridiculous price declines. Bruce wondered if the negative equity was really the driving force to most of the foreclosures. Carolina was uncertain and said there is some debate among economists about what actually caused the foreclosure crisis. Once prices start to decline, it becomes really hard to come up with an alternative of exiting your home if you are having payment difficulties other than foreclosure, whether it is because you cannot resell or do not have enough equity. However, it is a big part of the problem now and is certainly hurting homeowners, particularly homeowners who have lost their jobs or otherwise financially struggling due to the recession. It is one thing to have a negative equity position; but if you’re attached to the real estate industry then the odds of you making the same money that you were making in 2006 is very unlikely. If you are in the lending business and are paid a point-to-loan, you are now making a loan at half of the price and a lot less transaction. Even if you are employed, you are not as fully employed as you once were. Carolina said she believes families are really struggling right now because the after effects of the recession have gone on so long and unemployment still remains so high that even people who had considerable savings have burned through that. This has made it increasingly difficult for them to make their mortgage payments. Bruce said there is also acceptability right now to not making your payment that is definitely taking hold.

When The Norris Group buys foreclosure property, they have seen that the average length of people have been in the property for two years or more and have therefore been making payments for a couple years. There is a study that says if your circle of people starts performing strategic foreclosures, then there is pressure. You may be sitting next to your cousin, who is on vacation on a cruise ship, and he may be thinking, “The only reason this is possible for me to take this vacation is I stopped making that payment.” You begin feeling the urge to join the party. Carolina is not sure of the extent to which this may be a real problem across the state. In the many interviews she has done she has found that borrowers are really committed to making their mortgage payments, and they feel a real obligation to that with a real sense of self-worth about being able to make that payment and that commitment. Carolina said she wishes we had a way to empirically tease out which of the stories is the strongest, but there are probably just as many borrowers who are actually desperately trying to make their payments. Bruce believes if it was a lot more, you would have a gigantic foreclosure percentage. Bruce said he is dealing with the most foreclosures ever, but we are still not talking 10%. There are a lot of people upside-down making payments on things they know is over encumbered because it is the way they have been taught to be built.

One example of a group is there was an owner of a head shrunk fund in New York who owned a home in a real nice area in Orange County on a cul-de-sac. There were twelve houses, and he was the only one making his payment in the whole cul-de-sac. They actually had meetings every month with the eleven other people to discuss how it was going. This was considered a neighborhood strategic default, which Bruce had never heard of prior. Bruce also wondered about NSP funds. We have this foreclosure crisis, and the County of Riverside has their share of funds. The Norris Group met with the city and tried to figure out a way to work with them, but they could not really come up with something. Therefore, Bruce wondered how successful the NSP fund program has been and whether it was a wise expenditure of money. Carolina believed it was and that it was not a very big expenditure of money in terms of the housing market. We have to remember that it was a program that was developed in a period of crisis, so therefore there were a lot of mistakes made both in terms of initial program design and program implementation. Several municipalities and other areas that received NSP funds really struggled with the capacity to deploy those funds; but in other places they really have worked in the way they were intended and really helped to support non-profits and city governments in both purchasing distressed properties and returning them to productive use and affordable homeownership programs. Carolina believes there are a lot of examples of really innovating approaches to NSP implementation that maybe are not at the scale we would like them to be at but are certainly making a difference at the local level.

Bruce wondered why it is felt that the private investor would not be able to take on the inventory and provide a completely perfect house for these types of programs. It is not that the end buyer is getting a big discount, but he is getting a fixed-up home in a neighborhood area that has some challenges. In some places, they really are working to use NSP funds to turn them into permanently affordable homes through community land trusts. There is a very innovative program out of Boston Community Capital that tries to keep the distressed borrower in their home using NSP funds, but the best NSP funds usually go beyond this. There are a lot of investors out there who are not necessarily as responsible as others are. The idea behind NSP is trying to keep some of the wealth and some of the equity that exists in the home within community hands rather than in investor hands. Carolina does not see this as competition with other investors, but rather a very nice way to promote affordable housing within locally hard-hit areas. One of the challenges for NSP funds is they do have to compete with investors, and they did not end up with as many properties as they thought. This is one example of where you do not know when you are in the middle of a crisis, and people thought there would be plenty of properties that they would have been able to quickly acquire them. However, this turned out to not be true.

The delinquencies in California tripled in about a twelve month period, and foreclosures declined during the time period when delinquencies went from 3.4% to 11%, and foreclosures went from 1 ½% to .8%. Lenders stopped foreclosing. Carolina said they had problems with inventory even as early as 2009, but during that specific timeframe in 2008 they stopped. The reason they stopped in 2008 was when The Norris Group was buying REOs at the time, the lenders were receiving about $.18 on the dollar on their loan amount because there was so much inventory that the price was hammered to death. They stopped foreclosing on the inventory for a combination of reasons, such as they were capable of being fined by the city and prices were sinking because they had 16 months of inventory that was now down to 5 or 6. However, it is not churning in the background, and this is part of what Carolina’s report is saying that we are not finished with any of this.

One of the discrepancies that is a little scary is that we have already foreclosed on 2.3 million and have a little over 3 million to come, and in addition there was a wildcard statement that there was another report saying there was probably 10 million more to come. Bruce wondered where they obtained this figure, and Carolina said a lot of it was in the difference of measurement. The bigger figure, which was the 10 million, included the borrowers who were current but were significantly underwater. The estimate, therefore, was for borrowers who may still become delinquent, which CRL does not include. The estimate also included estimates of short sales, which CRL also does not assess in their reports. However, short sales are definitely gaining momentum in our world, so as far as the investor world they see that there is a shift. If you look at the California Association of Realtors’ figures, the short sales have already passed the number of REO sales in the counties of Orange and L.A. Riverside and San Bernardino are gaining momentum and you also have a fair amount of properties that will not necessarily go to the NSP stage because they are lowering the opening bids at the trustee sales to move the properties before they become an REO. Therefore, they are preventing as many REOs as they can, and there are also bulk deals where they are selling the notes in bulk to where people then have a chance to get a workout done because the new owner of the note owes a lot less than the face value of the note. In the $600,000 example Bruce used before, they might go buy the note for $350,000, and they would be in a great position to sit down with the owner to make a deal.

One thing that is a little aggravating is we never make a differentiation on the person that is upside down on how they got to that point. It’s the idea that one size fits all. So one person is upside down, but you had refinanced your way there and had pulled out $300,000. Or, in another example, someone’s application may have not been true. There is never a mention that when we are talking about a loan modification program we look at some of those categories and say we should not do it. Carolina agreed saying people got underwater under a multiple different ways, and the more careful studies do look at this. One of the things we are plagued by in this research is the lack of data that really helps us to combine all the different factors that went into both the loan origination decision and the outcome, particularly where borrowers are now given changes in house prices.

Bruce wondered what the next few years will be like for housing, and if when Carolina looks at the information if she is looking at it on a national basis or California specific. Carolina answered saying she is looking at national data, and she thinks the policy choices that we make now stand to make a real difference in what happens, how many people are affected, what neighborhoods are affected, and how long this downturn is really going to last. We do not need to throw up our hands at this point, but instead we need to continue thinking creatively about solutions. We also need to really understand that there are things we know we can fix, such as servicer behavior as well as aligning servicers and improving their servicing practices. We also need to get creative on the policy front in terms of reducing foreclosures and delinquencies as well as stabilizing housing markets.

Bruce wondered what ramifications happen, because it seems inevitable that we are going to have a decline of homeownership as we resolve this next pile of properties. He wondered what societal benefits has there really been having the biggest percentage of people ever owning their own home and what this has meant to cities and neighborhoods in the way of stability. Carolina answered that she has never been one who has been for getting the U.S. homeownership rate as high as possible, and she is not sure this is the goal for which we should be striving. Instead, we need to minimize homeownership gaps between different groups and making sure that where there are barriers to homeownership we should be able to overcome with prudent public policy. We should hope to overcome these because it remains true that owning a home is the best source of wealth for all families but particularly for low income and minority families. This is true partly because it is a savings mechanism and also because it is such a nicely leveraged asset. As Bruce said before, we know how to do this well. During the 1980s and 1990s, we really did help to increase homeownership rates among those groups of people and close the homeownership gap in a way that was responsible and actually promoted stability for both neighborhoods and families. Therefore, we should not lose sight of this goal.

Bruce believes homeownership is very important to our country. He was married at 17, so he was on the other side of the equation at that point. He remembered when he and Marsha bought their home after saving for two years, which at the time was only $750 a month; Bruce had the grant deed recorded in his name when he did not have a dime of equity. However, on the Saturday that followed he was able to mow his own grass, and he could tell you it felt like he was a man. It was then engrained in him that part of being an American is you are able to call the shots within your own yard. Bruce would really not like there to be policies that dictate big down payments and are so restrictive that you eliminate a lot of people from that privilege. It really does not make much sense. The pull of homeownership is strong among all different groups. People really do want to become homeowners to a large degree, and Carolina believes the evidence is very strong that when done responsibly it is good for wealth building, for communities, and families, particularly children in terms of later life outcomes. Therefore, when done right it really can be a very great way of expanding access to opportunity.

Bruce Norris and Sean O’Toole had the opportunity to go to Washington to talk to Fannie Mae and FHA about some of the solutions that they talked about at I Survived Real Estate at the Nixon Library. One of the things they talked about was the nothing down loan program and its ability to maybe move to another owner without formal qualification. That idea came from the early 80s when Bruce became an investor. To become a full-time investor, Bruce refinanced his house at 17 ½% fixed. He almost owned it free and clear. However, about 60% of real estate transactions in California between 1981 and 1983 were accomplished by not needing a new loan. They were allowed to take over the existing loans in a term called “Subject To.” You literally did not fill out paperwork from the lender and get approved. All you had to do was make sure the loan payment was current and you sent it one sheet of paper that says to take one person’s name off and put on another name.

If in the next two years we could have a program where you had nothing down, qualified people getting a VA loan and who could make the payment, and also made the loan transferrable to another owner someday; then that would be a very big benefit. The reason is because this low interest environment that we are enjoying right now will not always be there, but it is a huge savings. For the people who can get in now, especially the beginning group or the people who have not had a bigger share of ownership, to receive a 4% mortgage rate is bragging rights for 30 years. The housing cost would also be so low compared to their neighbor over time that they have a lot of spendable money. This would be a very big difference in their life, so hopefully we will not become so restrictive with our policies that we eliminate the chance to own homes for a good percentage of our people.

It is important to realize that owning a home is still an earned privilege. Sometimes we cross over to where it has become a right, and this is something that shows with people who are not making their payments. They have the mindset that they really deserve their house anyway, even if they cannot make the payments. These kinds of people are not in the communities that Carolina has been working in, but she can imagine if you ran into these people it would be frustrating. They do not realize that the bill is being passed onto others.

Carolina has been working for the Center for Responsible Lending for only a few months, but for the upcoming year they will be doing some more research on qualified residential mortgage, both working with definitions and trying to show that a 20% down payment is not necessarily in everybody’s best interest. They also hope to look a little bit at neighborhoods, neighborhood stabilization, and see what is happening in different places, particularly hard-hit areas in California.

For more information about The Norris Group’s California hard money loans or our California Trust Deed investments, visit the website or call our office at 951-780-5856 for more information. For upcoming California real estate investor training and events, visit The Norris Group website and our California investor calendar. You’ll also find our award-winning real estate radio show on KTIE 590am at 6pm on Saturdays or you can listen to over 170 podcasts in our free investor radio archive.

Carolina Reid

Senior Researcher at the Center for Responsible Lending

(Full Bio)

This week Bruce is joined by Carolina Reid. Carolina joined the Center for Responsible Lending in August 2011 as a senior researcher working out of the Center’s California office. Before coming to CRL, Carolina served as the research manager for the Community Development Department for the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. At the Fed, she published a substantial number of journal articles, working papers, and policy reports on the Community Reinvestment Act, the Foreclosure Crisis, Access to Credit, the role of anti-predatory lending laws. She also helped build the capacity of local stakeholders, including banks, nonprofits, and local governments, to undertake community development activities.

One of Carolina’s reports stated, “For decades, owning a home has been the most accessible way to build wealth and gain a foothold in the middle class, especially for lower income and/or middle income borrowers of color. This crisis threatens to undo decades of social, economic, and educational progress.” Therefore, whoever thought of the title “Lost Ground” chose a very meaningful title. The title was also a play on a previous report the Center for Responsible Lending published called “Losing Ground,” where they predicted the scale of the foreclosure crisis was related to subprime lending. Five years into the crisis, they thought it would be interesting to revisit this and see what we know now. Right now, we know that we are only about halfway through the crisis, which was a surprise in terms of how many borrowers are still delinquent or in some stage of the foreclosure process. We know that although the majority of borrowers that have been affected have been white families as well as higher income or middle income families, a disproportionate share of the foreclosure crisis has fallen on communities of color. Bruce wondered if it was possible that the lending programs were an attempt to get the people that had not had a chance to own a home to own one. This probably would have naturally been a higher percentage of families of color.

In “The Lost Ground,” the latest report CRL put out, they looked carefully at what led to the differential foreclosure rates among communities of color, borrowers of color, and they found it was very closely tied to the loan products that they received. It’s not necessarily that people were lending to the wrong kinds of borrowers, but rather they were offering borrowers the wrong kinds of loan products. These loan products had risky features, such as teaser adjustable interest rates, prepayment penalties. Some of the option ARMs and amortization loans that were really common between the 2004 and 2007 lending period really have much higher foreclosure rates than loans that are proven to build equity and wealth for families, such as the 30-year fixed rate mortgages. These were the years that the subprime product and all the creative loans had their peak. Bruce said that they buy foreclosures at the courthouse steps, and he believes the majority are two years of loans from 2006 and 2007.

In the report CRL just released, they were looking at loans that only originated between 2004 and 2008 at the height of the subprime lending boom. They were working with a sample of 27 million loans, and they also took special attention to try and make sure the loans they were representing had a wide coverage of the mortgage market. They looked at subprime, prime, and Alt A loans. They therefore have broad market coverage in these results. In the 2009 report, “The Untold Cost of Subprime Lending,” a very important question was asked, which was, “How did borrowers decide on which loan product to accept, and how knowledgeable were they about the loan terms?” This was a question that was not answered in the 2009 report. Carolina said she did not have an answer for this, but she did know that brokers, with their incentives to steer borrowers into more expensive loans, had a big role in it. However, she is still not sure of the mechanisms by which certain borrowers went to brokers and others may not have gone to brokers. CRL knows the loans were complicated, and borrowers did not shop around for a mortgage the way others may shop around for other product and therefore cost-compare. This put them in a more vulnerable position to get a product that was not well-suited to their circumstances. The also were probably given a product that was much more expensive than the loan that they actually might have qualified for based on their credit score.

One of the things Bruce recalled during that timeframe was he could not get on the radio without hearing about a loan program. It seems you would have been exposed to at least the teaser program on radio, called on it, and found out you didn’t qualify. It would seem at the time you would have known there was a shift in what you were going to be able to receive. This confused Bruce in a way in that it seemed like there would have been a natural exposure to at least a competitive product, or people were dealing with other people they felt so comfortable with that they had blind trust. Bruce wondered if CRL ever did a study on this and from whom loans were obtained from as well as there being so much trust they did not realize that they were taking advantage of the spread premium. Carolina answered that when she was on the Federal Reserve, she did a study that interviewed borrowers to develop a better understanding of why different borrowers received different kinds of loan products. She expressed with her own views that she discovered people did have a lot of trust in both brokers and lenders as being the professionals and trusted advisors who would put them into a responsible loan product or a loan product that was well-suited to their financial circumstances. What the borrowers did not understand was that these brokers had a financial incentive to spear them into a more expensive loan. There was not much evidence of shopping around, and it was very different to hear a radio ad than to actually know, given your own financial circumstances and credit score, how you might qualify. Carolina believes it is also important to distinguish between lending programs that were run through non-profits and other affordable homeownership programs where we have seen extremely low foreclosure rates and the lending products that were being pushed by the private market over the specific time period.

Bruce said this was probably the only time in history where the lenders themselves did not care if the loan was ever repaid because they did not own it very long. This is an astonishing piece of history we will probably never get to relive. It’s clear that there was not much incentive to make responsible, safe loans over this time period; and it has had devastating consequences for borrowers. This is one of the things about people who are losing their homes. 2.3 million people have already lost their home in foreclosure, and Bruce wondered what percentage of these people put down a down payment as well as what percentage of the people did a refinance and pulled out money. Carolina did not know the percentages off the top of her head, but there have been studies done off of this. CRL did look at the same patterns within the data for lost ground, and they found that when they looked at the patterns for people who put down a down payment and people who did not put down a down payment, they found there was not much difference in terms of who had marketed the most risky loan products. This included the relationship between the loan products and their ultimate status at the end. This could include whether or not they were in foreclosure. However, they know now that it is quite important it is to document somebody’s income and assets, which is part of the loan underwriting process. There were different terms for the risky loans and higher interest, but this was because the lenders were not documenting certain things.

A lot of the people have lost their homes in foreclosure, and Bruce wondered how many of them have actually lost money. If we looked into it, we may find a great many people did not have a down payment, they have now been in the home for two years not making a payment, or they have extracted equity in the meantime. We are concentrating on a group of people that lost their property. As an example of what could happen in Riverside where home values have declined by 50%, you could have somebody who borrowed $600,000 on a $600,000 home without a down payment. This was very easy to do. If they still owe $600, but the house is worth $300, and a next door neighbor put down 50% but owes $300 on a $300 grand house and has literally $300,000 of after tax dollars disappear from his life, then these people who we don’t talk about have probably been more damaged than the people we do. The negative spillover effects of foreclosure on surrounding neighbors is huge and on the market as a whole. There are plenty of borrowers who are still in their homes and have seen their equity erode as well as their wealth in their homes. This is one of the reasons we are pushing so hard to try and stabilize the housing market through foreclosure prevention just to stop all this downward slide of house prices.

Bruce said the reason we are not halfway through the foreclosure process is because we have delayed on foreclosing. Somebody who was foreclosed on fairly quickly in 2008 is literally re-emerging as a buyer in 2011 and 2012 because the system allows them to re-buy in three years after a foreclosure and get an FHA loan. For this gigantic group of people who we have not even stopped the credit damage, they are not going to be buyers until around 2015-2016. One of the problems and unintended consequences is your market does not heal really fast when you prevent people from actually losing a property. Carolina believes one of the reasons it is important to stop foreclosures is because of the negative spillover effects on neighborhoods. The neighborhoods that have been hit by the most foreclosures tend to be lower income neighborhoods and tend to be neighborhoods with high concentrations of minority households. These were neighborhoods that were starting to improve and a lot were invested in in terms of community development, but now they have received a big shock. The community there has been really hard hit by this process. The other real reason is there may be a few borrowers who are coming out of the foreclosure process and doing just fine a few years down the road, but most of the research shows a financial shock like that can actually have devastating consequences, not only in terms of rebuilding their credit score and regaining financial stability, then more generally the lost accumulation of wealth potential over the time period.
Carolina said she is not as sanguine as Bruce is about doing a foreclosure quickly is going to be the best thing for borrowers or neighborhoods. She agreed we cannot prevent every foreclosure, but in a lot of cases improved servicer practices would help encourage loan modifications for borrowers who can and do want to stay in their homes. We have good evidence that effective loan modifications do reduce the risk of subsequent default, and this is probably in everybody’s interest. This includes not only the borrower but also the investor in the neighborhood.

Bruce went on to talk about loan modifications. These have a fail rate of about 50% depending on when they were done. If you created a loan product with a 50% failure rate, you would not be calling this a success. However, Carolina disagreed in that she said the failure rates are the re-default rates that were calculated on loan modifications that actually did not necessarily reduce the payment. It did not help the borrower, so it was not surprising that the loan re-defaulted. She found that loans that do actually reduce monthly payments, particularly loans that help reduce them such as principle burden, have an excellent record for not going back into default very easily.

Bruce read a recent document that said facing the foreclosure crisis requires servicers to make reasonable modification. Bruce wondered if the word “requires” can be translated to mean requiring principle loan reductions. However, Carolina does not believe this to be the case. We all believe that principle reduction would go a long way to help stabilize the housing market in general. There are still some conservative economists who are calling for principle reduction, which everybody sees as a necessary step. However, the word “require” here refers to making sure that servicers clean up their practices and pursue modifications more responsibly than they have in the past and eliminate abusive practices such as duel tracking and modification at the same time as a foreclosure.

Bruce agreed because he said it was very frustrating for them who bought properties at the courthouse steps. When you legitimately buy property here, but then you go to someone’s door and they are in shock because they were told that they had a loan mod in progress, then this is awkward for everyone. They are not trying to short-circuit the system, but they are trying to make a living buying and rehabbing properties. You have people who have been told one thing by one department, but you have another department not even knowing the conversation occurred. This is not right. If you know the history, then this is the Great Depression at least of real estate. We have never had anything like this since the Great Depression where prices have fallen not 5% a year but sometimes 5% a month in the worst hit areas until you could have a 50% equity cushion and have no cushion inside of 18 months. This is a ridiculous price dive.

One of the things that we have to be careful of is the unintended consequences of policies that a lender looks at and says he did not know they could do it; but now that he does know it, his lending policies going forward will be different. Your goal is not to make the foreclosure rate 0 in the future because that would probably eliminate a lot of people from potential ownership that would in fact make a payment. One of the things that CRL has been doing research on is to show that you do not have to return to an incredibly restrictive environment to be able to promote healthy lending and a healthy housing market. You can eliminate the most abusive products, then get down to an acceptable foreclosure rate without necessarily excluding borrowers who would otherwise be qualified from access to credit. We have used a term “unprecedented,” which really has a duel meaning. It means what we did before made sense when we did not have one of these events. We just have to go back and do whatever we did prior to 2000. If we look at the data, we actually find that, in terms of expansion of homeownership rates and expansion of homeownership rates for lower income and minority households, we saw homeownership rates for them expand more during the early 1990 periods than we did in 2003 and 2004 onwards. The sub-prime boom actually helped to reduce the homeownership rate among those groups, so the riskiest lending did nothing to expand access to opportunity in the way we would like it to expand.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, there was a lot of attention paid to making sure that we do not restrict lending on purpose. This would have increased the ownership rate and the provision of affordable homeownership programs that offered borrowers with lower incomes and wealth the ability to access homeownership through a mortgage that was a 30-year fixed rate mortgage with reasonable monthly payments well within the borrowers’ ability to repay the loan over the long term. Bruce said the whole state of California is virtually an affordable program. However, in relationship to people’s incomes, house prices in California still remain high. It has definitely become more affordable in certain areas, the Inland Empire and the Central Valley being among some of the hardest hit in the country. We have to remember that over that late 1990 and early 2000 time period, house prices were so far above anybody’s annual growth in terms of their income that we’re not even at stable levels yet. Bruce said he would agree with this on price, but not on payment because if you combine a median price decline of $600 to below 3 and a decline to 4%, that monthly payment that emerges is very often less than rent.

There is a report produced by Cal Poly Pomona that is a really good report for people who do research because it is not median price or Case-Shiller. They actually have taken the time to appraise about 1,000 California properties every 6 months for decades. It is literally one house appraised in 1970 for one price and 2011 for another price. This is pretty neat because you can go backwards and see the price increase or decrease. What Bruce did was he took Lancaster, which is certainly one of the hardest hit areas. He took the compilation of properties and over the 20 year period from 1990 this group of properties lost 11% in real value. But interest rates in 1990 were 10%, so if you are a buyer in 2011 you get an 11% price discount, a 60% interest discount, and you’re making more money in the area. The payment that emerges for that buyer is $.29 on the dollar of the equivalent in 1990. This is the all-time monthly sale for ownership, and you have to consider interest rate because it is probably the biggest piece and one of the most economically beneficial for people that have lower income or are just beginning because it locks in their housing cost at fixed rate for a long time. This is one of the things in which we are missing the boat. One of the things Carolina intentionally did not point out was the need for a down payment, making a very big difference in the outcome of the loan. The best performing loan for probably the last 40 years is a VA, no down loan. This has the best payment history and the least damage for foreclosure. It would be a perfect time to have a nothing-down loan program right now, as this would help the people who don’t have a down payment but a payment they can afford. There would not be any harm in it, and it would be very successful. CRL has found that down payment matters somewhat, but it does not necessarily explain foreclosures to the extent that some people would say it does.

Tune in next week for part 2 of our interview with Carolina Reid.

For more information about The Norris Group’s California hard money loans or our California Trust Deed investments, visit the website or call our office at 951-780-5856 for more information. For upcoming California real estate investor training and events, visit The Norris Group website and our California investor calendar. You’ll also find our award-winning real estate radio show on KTIE 590am at 6pm on Saturdays or you can listen to over 170 podcasts in our free investor radio archive.

I Survived Real Estate 2011

(Full Bio)

On October 14, 2011, The Norris Group returned with its award-winning event I Survived Real Estate. An expert line-up of industry specialists joined Bruce Norris to discuss current industry regulation, head-scratching legislation, and the opportunities emerging for savvy real estate professionals. 100% of the proceeds support the Orange County Affiliate of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. This event would not have been possible without the generous help of the following platinum partners: ForeclosureRadar and Sean O’Toole, Housing Wire, the San Diego Creative Real Estate Investors Association and President Bill Tan, Investors Workshops with President Shawn Watkins and Angel Bronsgeest, Invest Club for Women and Iris Veneracion and Bobbie Alexander, San Jose Real Estate Investors Association and Geraldine Berry, Real Wealth Networks, Frye Wyles, MVT Productions, and White House Catering. The event video can be found on isurvived2011.com.

Bruce continued the discussion on risk-taking. Debra said you have a lot of uncertainty in the lending community right now waiting for regulation and waiting to understand the government’s role. Doug said he had been surveying 1,000 people a month for 16 months and publishes the report on his website, so he asks what their expectation is on interest rates and prices. In the most recent quarter, Fannie Mae also asked them what they thought about stability when it came to unemployment. 26% of the people who were employed were worried about not being able to stay employed. 9% of the people in the workforce are already unemployed, so you have over one-third of the workforce that is concerned about the base ability to pay anything. When you look at their expectation that interest rates are going to be essentially flat for the next two years, they expect house prices to fall during that time period. They are essentially asking, “Why would you tell us that right now is a good time to go out and borrow $200,000 and buy a house?” There is a lot of discussion about the HARP Program and why people are not considering this.

If you think about the practical aspect of what the household faces, you have to consider that they are asked to bring $4-$6,000 to the table. If they are worried about being unemployed in 6 months, they are essentially saying, “If the payback is $200 a month in savings, and it is a couple years before I receive the money back, what if in 6 months I don’t have a job?” So if you say you understand it, it makes sense, and you now need to roll it into the principle; it doesn’t sound like a good deal because you are asking me to take on extra leverage. So to the customer, at the end of the day there is a question of stable employment that is equally big to the supply of properties they have to work off still. That is as much a macroeconomic issue to Debra Still’s point about the uncertainty as it is about housing because the engine for job growth is small business. When small businesses are surveyed, the number one reason they say they are not hiring people is lack of sales. The number two reason is uncertainty about the tax and regulatory environment. Until macro-policy makers get back to focusing on what makes a good investment market for businesses to go into and hire people, we will most likely have a concentric circle between housing and the aforementioned problem. This means we need to reduce regulation and stop making every tax code have to be renewed every two years. We need to make some permanent decisions on whether you are going to advantage or disadvantage investment so that entrepreneurs have a clear view on whether they will be able to retain the capital gains that they make by investing in their business. These kinds of things have to be put in place to give it a strong investment environment, which will then lead to employment.

Eric Janzen reinforced Doug’s point by saying we have a general problem with under-investment in our economy. This means there is not enough capital going into investment versus consumption. The result of that is we are not planting seed corn in the housing market. This is also true in venture capital as is the case with a precipitous drop-off in early-stage companies, which are the companies that provide most of the jobs and all the growth as well as the exports and all the good things that come with it. It really comes down to what Doug said that we have to make investment decisions very clear and stop disadvantaging investment. Bruce wondered what the likelihood was of this happening in the next year. Eric said this was not a good year for these types of decisions, so the safest bet you can make is to assume nothing is going to happen in the next year. Doug said you would not get a better return on a bet than you would on investing.

Bruce asked what was standing in the way of letting investors participate more fully in taking the inventory down. At times in the past we had a 203k loan program that was available as well as more generous loans available to investors, but this ended in about 1995. Debra Still said the Mortgage Bankers Association supports relooking at the 203k program with some incremental safeguards versus the prior program. She said they would support clearing a lot of the inventory. Bruce said this would take care of one level, but there were people at I Survived Real Estate who would not want to go through the journey of that loan but would buy something as a rental; keep it for a long time, and do it in good size quantity. He wondered if there was any discussion on a deed restriction. Debra said one of the recommendations on the RFI that the MBI made was a 3-5 year whole provision. One of the things we have to consider is moving the extra inventory and look at investors to make it happen.

Bruce wondered about how the person who purchases, for example, 20 houses would fix them up and keep them. A company that buys 1,000 will probably try to make them livable, but this is not as helpful as making it nice. This is why the nothing-down program intrigues Bruce. Right now you have a chance to get people in at a very safe payment that is fixed. Later on when we have to pay more taxes, which we will, we will have room in our budget because that payment will seem like a car payment. However, if you don’t let people in, their rent payment is always going to approximate market. We are not going to give somebody a 30-year fixed rent rate. If you had people buying something at no-down at 4%, eventually you would have price support and would get rid of the inventory. Sean said if we could sell every house tomorrow at full-market value, it would crash the system. Doug reiterated saying the big picture problem is that at the end of the day someone will not be paid. It is just like the Greece situation. The political system is good at doling out benefits, but it is poor at doling out costs. A lot of what is happening is instead of the broad-based principle write-downs, which is something that could fix a lot of problems, we have adverse selection and an unfair distribution of results based on decisions made in households. Things are costly politically in addition to financially. There are some discussions of things which are small costs.

For example, some ideas have been floated about tax forgiveness for investors who would get a 3-year abatement of taxes on the rents that they receive if they were to invest in a property today. What this does is raise the rate of return to them, which in turn raises the bid price which they could be willing to put into the market and reduce losses to the institution which holds the loan. There is still a loss, but it is incremental and not as visible. It is actually moving some of the inventory. Therefore, you will most likely see a lot of program proposals and capital gains release. Debra said some of the recommendations are Fannie and Freddie looking at investor properties and making small incremental improvements to the HARP Program, which would include investors owning more than the limit of ten properties. This would also allow for higher LTVs or other loans after 2009. Principle write-downs are very challenging for mortgage lenders. You have to ask whether the tax payer is going to pay, the bank will pay, or will the investor pay. As Doug said, somebody is going to pay the bill.

Bruce wondered about the idea of refinancing owner-occupant or investor over encumbered mortgage. He wondered why we cannot simply refinance them at the current rate, whatever the LTV is. You have the loan anyway, so why can’t you just make it make sense so that people will be able to write out the loan. He wondered what the point was of having a 6% mortgage that is not getting paid when you could have a 3.5% mortgage that would. Debra said this is certainly one of the things on the list to discuss. One of the things we also need to consider is if you think about the capacity of the industry and the fact that the large depositories have a good portion of the properties, it would take the whole industry to participate to help move this big “elephant” through the system. Most lenders who do not already own the mortgage are going to want rep and warrant relief. The question is why a lender who does not already own a loan on an underwater property would make a deal unless they had some kind of rep and warrant relief. This is a big deal for part of the discussion.

Bruce also wondered about the idea of principle-only payments to get people back to an even level. Debra said if the loan is in a security, then the servicer has to advance principle and interest to the investor. The principle-only is still going to create a negative gap for whoever the servicer is because they are advancing to the investor principle and interest each month. Bruce wondered if the investor can make a new agreement, say he is going to lose a lot of money if the money does not get paid. Doug said he does not think there is anything that prevents two private parties who have a contract from reworking the contract. Sean wondered if it could trigger some CDO risk. You have to talk about the derivative risk and potentially magnifying losses. This was a problem years ago, and people have still not tried to go in and figure out how big the derivative risk is and where it lies. Debra said you have to wonder what you would do with mortgage liquidity if investors have to take the principle write-downs. The question is who is going to invest in mortgage-backed securities in the future, and what do you do to the future liquidity of the industry with some of the dramatic actions. Eric said if you look at the market data, the market has been continuing to decline. It spiked from about $300 billion to $1.2 billion, but the latest numbers show it’s back down to about $400 billion. You can exactly identify the point at which the market started to fall in the financial crisis. That market is probably not coming back for a long time until there is market clearing. There is also a hidden additional cost in forcing homeowners to pay mortgages against inflated home prices, which is that there is a string of payments that is going uneconomically to a home price that really should not have existed in the first place. Personal consumption expenditures are getting absorbed for a non-productive, non-economic purpose.

Bruce asked each one of the panelists if we get together a year from now, what is the one thing they would like to have accomplished for their industry. Debra said she would like for all mortgage lenders to work collaboratively with each other. If you think about the industry, there are large depositories, small community banks, and independent mortgage bankers. They need to work collaboratively with one voice, decide on a way forward, and not be fighting each other. In addition, they need to work collaboratively with regulators and the policy makers to make sure that we don’t overcorrect and make sure the regulators understand the unintended consequences of the massive amount of regulation. They should also make sure they end up in the right place one year from now with the whole regulatory environment.

Doug Duncan agreed with Debra and said a great deal of it is overkill based on evidence that the market is simply adjusting back to what is a sustainable homeownership rate. Underwriting standards have moved back to more traditional levels. If the homeownership rate is going to be lower, then by definition the investor and rental share has to be higher. This is why there is finally a turn to focus on ways that this can be advantaged.

From the appraisal side, Sara Stephens believes one of the most important things going forward and what she would like to see happen coming into 2012 is a real effort on the part of lenders and the people who regulate the appraisal business to take a look at the difference between an appraiser and a qualified appraiser. The difference is huge. She also wants the lenders and regulators to take a look at the expertise and the education that one has as compared to a person who is just simply earning a fee. Working with the appraisal institute and other professional organizations would certainly be important. The Appraisal Institute would like to work with the lending community, the brokers, and everyone who is involved in the mortgage lending process to make an effort to use the most qualified people who can give the most reliable conclusions.

Sean O’Toole said he would like to change the national discussion on what a home is worth. The sales comparable approach to appraisal versus income or cost basis is ridiculous. It certainly was not the cause of the problem, but it didn’t help keep the problem from getting out of control. We also have a poor understanding nationally of what a home or a piece of residential real estate is really worth. Bruce said if you think about the appraisal process, when Bruce was purchasing in Grand Junction Colorado in 1985, there was no taker in sight. The only comp was his comp. If you had three of these, this was the appraisal number. In Moreno Valley, 2-bedroom houses that were going for $300 had company, and the appraiser had all the evidence that this was the right decision. This is what Sean was talking about reconsidering the definition of market value to have some other factor that doesn’t let things get out of control, whether up or down. This would give us to have stability that in turn would allow lending to be a lot saner and change the whole game.

Gary Thomas said he would like to see clarity from the members of his organization on what they’re doing. Are we still going to have mortgage interest deductions? We need to consider all the things that are really holding everybody back because they really do not know what the future is. Buyers don’t know whether you’re going to still be able to write off the interest on a loan. They don’t know whether they are going to have to put 20% down, 10%, 0r 5%. There are so many unknowns out there that everybody feels like they are in quicksand. Having some stability from a regulatory standpoint would go a long ways towards making things better for the industry.

Eric Janszen said within the context of the American political system, the aftermath of bubbles is always predictable. It is the collective punishment of the innocent. We had Sarbanes Oxley after the dot come crash, which is the Accounts Full Employment Act. This time we have overregulation across the board. It needs to be counter cyclical, so at this point we need to as quickly as possible regain a clear, consistent, and unencumbered relationship between buyer and seller.

Bruce Norris ended by saying he wishes that everyone that we elected in any position of public office would set aside whether they are Democrat or Republican and become American for one year so we can get a lot of things resolved.

This is the final segment for I Survived Real Estate. Thank you to everyone who attended and have tuned in to our radio broadcast. The Norris Group would like to thank their gold sponsors for the event: Adrenaline Athletics, Coldwell Banker Pioneer Real Estate, Conaway and Conaway, Delmae Properties, Elite Auctions, Inland Empire Investors Forum, Inland Valley Association of Realtors, Keller Williams of Corona, Keystone CPA, Kucan & Clark Partners, LLC, Las Brisas Escrow, Leivas Associates, Mike Cantu, Northern California Real Estate Investors Association, Northern San Diego Real Estate Investors Association, Pacific Sunrise Mortgage, Personal Real Estate Magazine, Raven Paul and Company, Realty 411 Magazine, Rick and LeaAnne Rossiter, Southwest Riverside County Board of Realtors, Starz Photography, uDirect IRA, Wilson Investment Properties, Tony Alvarez, Tri-Emerald Financial Group, and Westin South Coast Plaza. Visit isurvived2011.com for more details.

For more information about The Norris Group’s California hard money loans or our California Trust Deed investments, visit the website or call our office at 951-780-5856 for more information. For upcoming California real estate investor training and events, visit The Norris Group website and our California investor calendar. You’ll also find our award-winning real estate radio show on KTIE 590am at 6pm on Saturdays or you can listen to over 170 podcasts in our free investor radio archive.