| Mortgage brokers fight bill on subprime standards
Local mortgage brokers received a pep talk Wednesday from industry leaders about why they need to organize against federal legislation that they believe will limit their ability to do business. In particular, they are targeting a bill by U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn. "It needs to be modified, or it needs to go," George Hanzimanolis, president of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, told members who attended a Greater Houston Mortgage Brokers Association town hall luncheon. Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, last year introduced SB 2452, which would set more stringent standards for subprime mortgages, including a requirement that lenders show that prospective borrowers can repay the loans. Mortgage brokers say the bill hurts small businesses and eliminates the way they get paid what's known in the industry as the "yield-spread premium" on certain loans.
Dodging a bullet
At this year's gathering of the United States Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C., there's little to celebrate. Executives from hard-hit Eastern and Midwestern cities are calling on the federal government to assist them in dealing with the fallout from the subprime mortgage meltdown that has left thousands of homes vacant and undercut property tax revenues that fund municipal services. Houston Mayor Bill White, who passed on the conference this year, can sympathize with his colleagues' pain but is not feeling it locally. The city's economy, bolstered by a booming energy sector, has not experienced the nosedive in the housing market that has occurred elsewhere. Likewise, Texas leads the nation in job growth and single-family home starts and sales. Foreclosures in Harris County rose a moderate 24 percent in 2007, totaling less than a third of the record 30,742 that occurred in 1987.
Viewing options
You can be pro-choice and still be considered a conservative. Because being pro-choice doesn't mean you are pro-abortion, it means you do not want government involved in the choice, or at the very least limited government. But at the same time you teach individuals that abortion is wrong, you do your best to talk them out of it. The same way I am against smoking, but do not want government to write laws outlawing smoking ( though I do appreciate the clean air act ). Pro-abortion means you get upset when a woman choses to not have an abortion, or you minimize abortions as not being that big of a deal. In any case, my main point was people say Huck is against abortions so thereby he is a conservative, and that is false. .
Credit unions juggle home loans with other services
Home lending may not be new among Columbus-area credit unions, but it is increasingly viewed as an important product to offer to customers and an attractive means to bolster the bottom line, according to local credit union executives. Often viewed as place to get a vehicle or personal loan, credit unions are more aggressively marketing home lending products to their existing and potential new customers, says Rob Bachman, mortgage manager of Kemba Financial Credit Union. Bachman, who joined the Gahanna-based credit union to help grow its fledgling mortgage business seven years ago, says Kemba and other large area credit unions have become more progressive in serving the home loan consumer. "They wanted to grow this more than they had," Bachman says. "In the past, it was more of a niche product.
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