Countrywide Launches America’s Open House Campaign

Calabasas, CA (Vocus/PRWEB ) October 3, 2007 — In an effort to help home buyers better understand today’s home financing options, Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., will enlist more than 7,000 home loan consultants to visit residential open houses across the country over the next six weeks to provide an array of mortgage financing options for customers.

Report Comes Week After Interest Rate Cut

Several members of the Senate Banking Committee questioned rating agency executives about whether they provided advice to investment banks that issue complex mortgage securities tied to subprime home loans.

“It seems to me that credit rating agencies are playing both coach and referee,” said Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.

The rating agencies’ seal of approval effectively concealed the true risks of those investments, lawmakers said. Several senators compared the agencies’ lack of foresight about the risks inherent in the subprime mortgage market with their failure to anticipate the collapse of Enron Corp. and WorldCom.

Democratic and Republican senators said they were particularly concerned with a key aspect of the agencies’ business models: they get paid by the companies whose bonds they rate. That’s like a film production company paying a critic to review a movie, and then using that review in its advertising, Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., said.

A fascinating dispute on modern economics — and the dominant role it plays in our politics - is currently taking place in America’s bookstores.

On one side is Alan Greenspan, whose The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World offers his usual free market uber alles philosophy, while attempting to rehabilitate his tattered image (which is worth about as much as the U.S. dollar these days).

On the other side is Naomi Klein, whose The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism offers an alternative economic history of the last 30 years and, using the war in Iraq as a mind-blowing example, pulls the curtain back on free market myths and exposes the forces that are really driving our economy.

Klein’s book is powerful and prophetic. Greenspan’s is pitiful and pathetic.

Yet it is Greenspan’s 500-page memoir that been getting all the attention, as almost no traditional media outlet has been able to resist what Josh Marshall has aptly dubbed “The Greenspan Embarrassment Tour.”

LendingTree
cost per lead $65
success fee $850
conversion rate 6%
cost per fund $1,933
Monthly Volume 1,000.00
Number of Loans 60.00
Avg. Loan Size $360,000
Avg Points per loan 2%
Avg. Fee Income $7,200
Gross $432,000
LT Fees $116,000
Net $316,000
ROI % 272.41%

Typical Provider
cost per lead $30
success fee $0
conversion rate 3%
cost per fund $1,000
Monthly Volume 1,000.00
Number of Loans 30.00
Avg. Loan Size $360,000
Avg Points per loan 2%
Avg. Fee Income $7,200
Gross $216,000
LT Fees $30,000
Net $186,000
ROI % 620.00%

WASHINGTON - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress Thursday the credit crisis has created “significant market stress” and offered fresh assurances that regulators would take steps to curb fallout related to the mortgage mess.

NEW YORK - Sales of existing homes, depressed by turmoil in credit markets, fell for a sixth straight month in August, pushing activity to the lowest point in five years an industry trade group said Tuesday. A separate report showed that t
he nationwide decline in home prices accelerated in July, posting the steepest drop in 16 years.