| Application for home loan can spur sale of your data
Home-finance companies buy applicant information from the nation's credit bureaus, which track and rate consumers' financial lives. A prospective lender checks an applicant's credit record by contacting a credit bureau, which records the inquiry and then bundles the applicant's name, address, phone number and credit score with that of other recent loan applicants, and sells the lot to anyone who will pay the fee. Because the loan application triggers an inquiry to the credit bureau, these lists of potential borrowers are called "trigger leads." They have become a hot commodity in the past few months, used by some lenders to drum up business in a slumping market, though they rile many borrowers. "Customers are getting mad at their lenders, asking, 'Why are you selling my data?' " said Amy Boyer, chief lobbyist for the Wisconsin Mortgage Bankers Association.
MortgageDaily.com: Mortgage Blame, Warnings
RISMEDIA, April 3, 2007-Realtors blame the subprime crisis on greed, while mortgage brokers are warning against trigger leads, according to the latest week's coverage from http://www.MortgageDaily.com - a dominant source of online news for the mortgage industry. An economist for the National Association of Realtors said in a recent newsletter the group's price growth forecast has been lowered to 1.2% because of subprime problems. He reported California was among states with the highest subprime share while the Dakotas were among states with the lowest. "The excessive greed of some people wanting easy high-interest bearing income led to some companies lending to shaky borrowers during the housing boom," the economist concluded. A panel at a National Association of Mortgage Brokers conference offered advice for fighting trigger lists-a controversial lead generation method.
Muhlenkamp Fund slowed by mortgage woes
Ronald Muhlenkamp's $2.4 billion Muhlenkamp Fund, which lost value just once in the past 12 years, is getting hurt by the shakeout in the U.S. mortgage market. Muhlenkamp's mutual fund has dropped 4.8 percent since the start of the year, through March 6, the worst performance of 90 competing funds tracked by Bloomberg that buy shares of companies perceived as being undervalued. Muhlenkamp counts Countrywide Financial, the biggest U.S. mortgage lender, among his 10 largest holdings. Rising mortgage rates and falling home prices caused the proportion of subprime loans that were either delinquent or in foreclosure to reach 10 percent in December, up from about 5 percent in May 2005, according to Friedman Billings Ramsey Group of Arlington, Va. Countrywide, which focuses on the safer, so-called prime part of the market, said recently that payments were late on almost 20 percent of the subprime loans it manages for clients.
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