U.S.A. Mortgage Corporation Industry News Update

700 Portage Trail. Cuyahoga Falls, OH 44221 Office: 330-945-9800 Toll-Free: 800-816-7935

Govt.'s Big Dogs May Be Leashed

The government's financial lending institutions, Fannie and Freddie, may have more regulations placed on them in the near future if the treasury department has anything to say about it. A draft for a new amendment was delivered by Treasury Secretary John Snow that is purporting to pop the $1.5 trillion bubble of these two institutions in hopes of curbing their forces to a unified purpose.

Public housing as a goal is being pushed to the forefront with this bill, trimming these two enterprises down to size in order to achieve the greater common good, according to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. He goes on to say that the unpredicted size increases from 1990, when the two companies only had $132 billion holdings to now with approximately $1.5 trillion holdings, these Government Enterprises are increasingly more difficult to monitor and correct during their expansion.

In short, with regards to the current lending market, there will be little change from this initiative anytime soon. However we must begin to consider life without the dominance of these two enterprises in the industry and make a plan for a more diversified strategy in our financial marketing and sales.

BOOM!

The National Association of REALTORS â reported Tuesday that April sales of existing homes rose to new heights with a 4.5 percent increase marking the highest annual gain in nearly 25 years. Prepare for more as records are high and mortgage rates continue to be low.

The industry has been indelibly marked by a rapid real estate growth and although there is some speculation by economists as to the stability of current pricing, all indications at this point seem to indicate a full-steam ahead approach at least in the short term. With the unanticipated rush of market success creating the record last month the NAR has revised it's previously strong sales estimation from 6.89 to a 6.9 million unit pace.

Additionally the median for the cost of a home rose 15.1 percent from the same time a year ago, reported the NAR, the largest increase since November of 1980. This is good news for us in the short term, hopefully providing plenty of opportunity for company growth and personal success to build on for the future.

Finding and Keeping an Identity

The issue of identity is one that has become increasing heated in the electronic world in recent months. With banks reporting records missing and individuals discovering enormous impersonation electronically, the results have sent us on a downward spiral of security. Today availability previously private information is practically available to all at websites such as ZabaSearch.com , a searchable and free personal database.

Incidents of identity theft have not just been in the hundreds, but like Time Warner found out the hard way with their admittance of losing 600,000 of their employee's social security numbers, everyone is at risk. A great deal of legislation is being considered on Capital Hill in order to counteract this problem, however in the mean time we are seeing even more reported losses such as Bank of America this week who informed 100,000 customers that their records may have been compromised by BoA employees and sold to collection agencies.

As the numbers from this most recent case and others come in we have tremendous pressure in our interaction and business practices with our customers to ensure them the safest transaction and relationship possible. As quickly as these tragedies are being leaked there are programs being developed to reduce the flow of personal information to unauthorized users. Simple steps include; using programs designed for security to store personal information, using passwords that change on a consistent basis, clearing out unsecured email that might compromise a customer's security.