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Mortgage insurers won’t stand in the way of Fannie and Freddie short sales | Bedford NY Real Estate

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Starting tomorrow, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have a green light from nine private mortgage insurers to approve short sales for distressed borrowers without a separate review.

Fannie and Freddie require that borrowers take out mortgage insurance if they are making down payments of less than 20 percent of the value of the home they are financing. Letting loan servicers working for Fannie and Freddie approve short sales and deeds in lieu of foreclosure without a separate review by mortgage insurers has the potential to reduce costs, delays and uncertainty, Freddie Mac said in announcing the move.

The nine mortgage insurers that have agreed to expedite short sales are CMG Mortgage Insurance Co., Essent Guaranty Inc., Genworth Mortgage Insurance Corp., Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp., PMI Mortgage Insurance Co., Radian Guaranty Inc., Republic Mortgage Insurance Co., Triad Guaranty Insurance Corp., and United Guaranty Corp.

In announcing the new agreement, Fannie Mae said it previously had individual delegation agreements with the “majority of its top mortgage insurers.” Having a standard delegation agreement in place all nine mortgage insurers makes the approval process “more consistent and efficient for servicers and borrowers.”

The new delegation agreement allows loan servicers to approve any short sale or deed-in-lieu that meets Fannie and Freddie’s requirements without individual mortgage insurance approval.

“We applaud the nation’s mortgage insurers for committing to work with us and our servicers to help more borrowers obtain short sales and other foreclosure alternatives,” said Tracy Mooney, senior vice president for loan servicing and REO at Freddie Mac, in a statement. “By paving the way for more borrowers to avoid foreclosure, today’s announcement will support the housing recovery and help reduce taxpayer losses.”

Fannie and Freddie’s new streamlined short sale approval process also goes into effect tomorrow. The mortgage giants will offer up to $6,000 to second-lien holders to expedite a short sale, and reduce or eliminate paperwork requirements for borrowers who have missed several loan payments, have low credit scores, or have serious financial hardship.

via inman.com

Douglas Kennedy, RFK son, on trial in child endangerment case | Bedford Corners Realtor

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The trial for a son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, accused in a maternity ward scuffle, began on Monday in Westchester County, New York.

Douglas Kennedy is charged with physical harassment and child endangerment, both misdemeanors. On Jan. 7, Kennedy allegedly tried to take his 2-day-old son from the maternity ward at Northern Westchester Hospital.

Nurses tried to stop him and two claimed he injured them. One nurse said Kennedy twisted her arm and the other said he kicked her in the pelvis. Security officers eventually stopped Kennedy from leaving the hospital.

In opening statements, according to the Associated Press, the defense argued that a nurse overreacted to Kennedy’s attempt to get some fresh air for his son. The prosecution maintains Kennedy violated hospital policy when he tried to move the child.

Bounce Rates High? Why? | Bedford NY Real Estate

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Most bloggers I know want to reduce their bounce rates. Sometimes it can seem as if it doesn’t matter what the bounce rate for a page actually is, we want it to be lower!

Bounce

Image courtesy stock.xchng user ColinBroug

While it’s a stretch to expect we’ll hit a zero bounce rate, for most bloggers, it is worth looking at your bounce rates regularly, and trying to find ways to reduce them where appropriate.

While blogging’s about people—not just numbers—bounce rates can give you hints about the ways individuals are using your blog, and where you can help them out. In this post, I’d like to explain that in a bit more detail.

What is a bounce?

You undoubtedly know what a bounce is—a user who lands on our page from an external source, then leaves our blog without looking at any other pages. It’s a “single pageview” usage of our site.

But what does a bounce mean?

  • Did the reader get what they came for, and leave?
  • Were they disappointed by what they saw on your blog page?
  • Did they arrive at the page expecting to see something else?
  • Is the content current and compelling—and clearly so?
  • Is it clear from a single glance at the page what your blog is, does, and delivers?
  • Are there clear paths from that page to other actions or information that are likely to meet the needs of target users?
  • Are the bouncers regular readers who check out all your posts, so each time they just come to the latest one, read it, and go again>

Understanding the possible reasons for the bounce is an important step in doing something to reduce the bounce rate itself. Let’s look at a case study from ProBlogger to see exactly how the diagnosis of reasons for a high bounce rate can go.

The bounces, and the page

On a usual trawl through the site’s stats one month, I spotted this:

Bounce rate stats

These stats were for a single month. As you can see, this page attracted some good views, and almost 95% of them were from new visitors! But the bounce rate was really high, the time on site low, and the average visit duration? Terrible!

My first thought was to visit the page itself. It didn’t take me long to find a few issues—let’s step through some of the main ones I found (note that I’ve updated the post since, so these items have been addressed on the live page):

  • The opening dated the article. This piece has a publication date of 2008, but even if the new visitors didn’t see that, the opening, which would have been fine at that time, was written when I was a Twitter newbie—not ideal these days!
  • This problem was amplified by the outdated Twitter follower number I’d quoted. I mentioned in the post that I had 5500 followers; now that number’s over 160,000.
  • I’d included a link to Twitip in the opening. This immediately pulled readers through to one of my other sites, which doesn’t generate any income. While the content had been valuable, that site’s a bit dated now, due to a lack of regular updates. It certainly seemed smarter to try to keep these new visitors on problogger.com a bit longer, rather than syphon them off to Twitip.
  • Much of the content in the article itself was dated.
  • The post didn’t provide many links to other great articles we have on topics like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social networks, and social network engagement strategies, here at ProBlogger—simply because that information wasn’t available back in 2008 when I’d written the post.

Yep, this page was pretty outdated! But I bet most sites that have been around for a while will probably have a page or two that are in a similar state.

Sources of bouncing traffic

Okay, so I knew I had a problem with the content of the page—and there were plenty of opportunities to improve it. But in order to make the right improvements—improvements that would give me the best chance of reducing that bounce rate by actually meeting individuals’ expectations—I wanted to know what the users were expecting to see when they came to the page. What needs did they have?

So I took a look at the traffic sources for the page:

Traffic sources

This was interesting. For any blog that gets a lot of its new traffic from search engines, you might expect the main traffic source to be Google. And when I first looked at the page in question, I’d imagined that most of the traffic to this page was coming from search and being pulled to Twitip. In fact, the traffic was coming from Twitip.

Understanding how the page is being used

Now I was getting a pretty clear idea of how this page was being used, and why the bounce rate was so high.

Twitip users were following a link from that site to this article. The second paragraph of the post was directing them right back to Twitip. In that case, would they feel that ProBlogger was more of an authority on Twitter than Twitip? Not likely. No wonder the bounce rate was so high!

But, as expected, Google was also among the top three referrers, and that traffic had a bounce rate of more than 90%.

Beyond content

Knowing that this page was being visited mainly by new users, it was worth looking beyond the content itself, to the page’s layout, branding, and design.

This page is laid out in the same way as the others on my blog, many of which—even if they mainly attract new users—don’t have such high bounce rates. This suggests that the layout probably isn’t the problem.

Now, the major call to action—the main point of engagement and interaction—on my blog’s content pages is to comment. Comments had long since closed on this post, so users may have struggled to find their way to other relevant content on the site at the post’s end. I’d included a Further Reading list there, but the articles were no longer current.

Yet, given how outdated the post was, and the tiny average visit duration, I guessed the visitors I was getting probably weren’t making it that far through the post anyway.

Understanding your bounces

As you can see, a little sleuthing can go a long way in helping you to understand the reasons for high bounce rates.

I try not to be thrown into a panic by the numbers alone. When I look a little deeper, I usually hit on more information that can help you take action on the bounces—if indeed that’s what you want.

In the case of this page, we made some tweaks to bring the content up to date an try to draw search traffic more deeply into the site.

But the reality for the high bounce rate from Twitip users is this: Twitip targets a different audience from ProBlogger. While it’s not unlikely that bloggers will read Twitip, that site is at once far more focused (Twitter tips only!) than this one, and more broad (it targets anyone who wants to use Twitter better—which could include casual, social users of the network, right through to online marketers in corporate environments).

So while ProBlogger contains Twitter tips, to try to convert traffic from Twitip into readers of this blog is probably a bit of a challenge. The two audiences want different things. While it was definitely worthwhile updating the ProBlogger post, the Twitip audience, on the whole, probably isn’t going to be interested in what we’re doing over here.

And that’s an important thing to realise: not all bounces are bad, and not all need addressing. Many do and will, and they’re the ones you’re better to spend your time trying to fix. But you won’t be able to work out which ones they are unless you take a few minutes to dig into the facts behind the bounces in the first place—to think about the individual users behind the numbers.

What do you do about your blog’s bounce rates? Have you been able to lower bounce rates through any specific tactics? I’d love to hear your tips in the comments.

via problogger.net

Fannie and Freddie becoming ‘wards of the state’? | Bedford NY Realtor

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The government’s failure to overhaul mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is pushing the U.S. toward nationalization of the mortgage market, and would-be homeowners will be the losers if competition between private companies isn’t restored.

That’s according to Jim Millstein, the former Treasury Department official who oversaw the reorganization of American International Group Inc., who thinks the government will have to get into the business of reinsuring mortgages if it wants to restore the private sector’s role in mortgage securitization, and reduce taxpayer exposure to Fannie and Freddie.

Millstein, the Treasury Department’s chief restructuring officer from 2009 to 2011, says neither the Obama administration nor Congress has put forward a workable plan to lift mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of conservatorship.

Increasing the fees charged by the companies and taking all of their earnings threatens to make Fannie and Freddie “permanent wards of the state,” Millstein argues in an editorial he co-wrote with Phillip Swagel, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

Millstein and Swagel have proposed legislation that would create a new government reinsurance program, and turn Fannie and Freddie into one of many private “first loss” insurers that would pay into it.

Four years after the takeover of Fannie and Freddie, they say, “the government now backstops 90 percent of all new mortgages and has no plan to reduce its market share, no plan to protect taxpayers against future losses on the trillions of dollars of mortgage credit underwritten since the firms were placed under government control.”

The Treasury Department’s decision to claim Fannie and Freddie’s earnings as dividends is intended to make sure that taxpayers recoup the $141 billion they’re still owed from bailing the companies out (Treasury has invested $187 billion in the companies and received in $46 billion in dividends). But the government’s “cash sweep” prevents Fannie and Freddie from building up capital reserves that would protect taxpayers against potential losses on $4.5 trillion in mortgage guarantees, Millstein and Swagel argue.

In a similar fashion, recent increases in Fannie and Freddie’s guarantee fees mandated by the Federal Housing Finance Agency would seem “sensible and long-overdue,” the two maintain. Fannie and Freddie, they say, “had grossly underpriced the insurance they provided on mortgages before the crisis, putting taxpayers at risk for the bailout that inevitably came and making it difficult for other private companies to compete with them.”

But the fees are still “significantly below” what private companies would charge, and the increases are all going to the government, rather than helping Fannie and Freddie build up capital and reserves.

“With Washington hungry for revenue, there will be inexorable pressure to milk Fannie and Freddie’s guarantee fees to support other government spending,” Millstein and Swagel warn. “The losers will be potential homeowners, as mortgage availability will be determined by government regulators rather than by private firms competing for their business.”

Ironically, they say, the quickest way to get Fannie and Freddie out of conservatorship and restore competition among private firms is for the government to get into the mortgage reinsurance business. Millstein and Swagel envision a system in which private mortgage insurers would take on a growing proportion of the first loss on bad mortgages before government reinsurance would kick in.

Fannie and Freddie would themselves be transformed into private, “first loss” insurers, and forced to compete with other private companies willing to pay the government for reinsurance.

With “strict regulation to ensure that community banks can originate and securitize mortgages on an even playing field with the giant banks,” competition would breed new entrants in mortgage finance. Any of them, including Fannie and Freddie, could fail without the threat of a housing market collapse, Millstein and Swagel maintain.

A government reinsurance program will be a tough sell to conservatives, they acknowledge. But the government, having placed Fannie and Freddie in conservatorship, is already “creeping” toward nationalization of the mortgage market.

A government reinsurance program with private insurers ahead of the government is perhaps the only way, they say, to shrink Fannie and Freddie’s portfolios, reduce taxpayer exposure, and jump start a competitive private market.

“Today, we’re doing massive guarantees through the conservatorships of Fannie and Freddie,” Millstein tells the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos. “But it’s a ham-fisted, convoluted way of delivering the guarantee. Taxpayers aren’t being protected at all. There’s no capital ahead of us.”

via inman.com