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Tree.com Sees 34% Decline in Revenue Tree.com announced its 3rd quarter earnings this morning and stated a $22.5 million loss. Doug Lebda, the company’s chief executive, called the results “acceptable” given the current market environment, and he lauded the hard work of his employees and the company’s discipline on costs. Popularity: 1% [?] Note to Self: Your Ideas Must Make Money First. I just received the following letter from BlogRush, which was a company that created a widget that was supposed to help drive traffic to your blog or website by posting the titles of your posts on other sites that had the same widget and it reiterates that fact that not all ideas will turn out like Facebook. The days of thinking of a good idea and building it without taking into count how and if it will make money and it then being valued has a billion dollar company, are few and far between. I would suggest that you insure your idea can produce a revenue before building out of the goodness of your heart. Just a thought, though. . . Popularity: 1% [?] While loan modifications seem to be as popular as standing on the corner of Main Street with a “Vote Yes for Prop 8″ sign in my conservative neighborhood, the government is set to announce their own loan modification plan of its own. According to the AP today, the gov’t discussing the possibility of using $50 billion of the $700 billion financial industry bailout plan to guarantee about 3 million mortgages. This is the point where you start running around the room hysterically with your hand raised saying “pick me, pick me, pick me” and then your realize that your not sure you can use the excuse of the financial meltdown as your hardship or the fact that this is not going to help everyone who has at least 1 late on their mortgage and possibly not the 500,000+ that are in the foreclosure as we speak, but and a big but for that matter, this is a really good start. Continued Popularity: 1% [?] Late last week a few more companies took fatal shots from the credit crisis. E-Loan and Ace Mortgage Funding could no longer withstand the intense battle ground that is the mortgage industry. According to an ml-implode tip, Ace simply could not make the change from a sub prime lender to an FHA specialist. Previous yearly volume of about $3 billion was said to currently be down by half as much. One AE told us “They were funding about $100 – 125 Million per month from their branch operations.” Its clear that we are far from a bottom as housing starts hit 17 year lows and job losses are happening everywhere from financial companies to Internet based companies like Yahoo. There is one common things that does seems to be proving itself as true. Companies that would like to be around this time next year need to take quick and decisive action. I am not convinced that holding out and laying low is the right answer. For some companies this might be the best action, but I would be hard pressed to see a company be able to sustain revenues without diversifying their offerings. Ultimately, I guess that is the million dollar question. Continued Popularity: 1% [?] We have been able to sit on the funny photos from Targus Lead Quality summit for the last few days and have been able to discuss lead exchanges in detail, but lets take a look at the innovation topic, again. At the Lead Quality Summit there were discussion, albeit few, about innovations in the space. First I would like to point out that the lead industry is fairly opaque and very little discussions actually take place that really discuss innovation. I fall into the same boat and rarely discuss actual ideas of innovation and in fact discuss very little of what some of my side projects actually involve. Why? Well, for me it involves fairly sensitive proprietary information. I assume it is the same for others, however lets discuss a few ideas that we have openly discussed before and exchange opinions on if the ideas would be beneficial. Continued Popularity: 1% [?] Today, TargusInfo released photos from there most recent conference in Las Vegas. I wanted to post some of the photos here so you can get an idea of what people were really thinking while they attended the conference. Here we have Dave Helmreich of TargusInfo chatting with fellow colleague Paul McLenaghan while people gather into the conference room.
Continued Popularity: 2% [?] Last week Zillow announced their automated quotes API. The new addition will allow lenders to receive and respond to quote requests in real time and will obviously speed the tedious process tremendously. (Note to Zillow, change the “How it works section“…”You will not receive “insta-quotes” done by a computer”) “We’re excited to be announcing the Zillow Quote API today to enable the lenders within Zillow Mortgage Marketplace to more efficiently service a larger number of borrowers, ultimately helping them gain more business,” said Lloyd Frink, President of Zillow.com. “We believe this new feature will also improve the experience for the borrowers on our site by providing a greater number of quotes, faster, as well as more options in rates and lenders to help them chose the right loan and lender for them.” I am not aware of the specifics of the API, however the first question I have is if and how this may affect the quality of the quotes. I’ going to assume the quotes that the lenders were manually answering were fairly specific to the borrowers needs. Then again, maybe maybe I am wrong. Nonetheless, I think this is going to possibly lower the quality of the quotes and the services the consumers will receive. I know previously I said that the Zillow Marketplace was too much of a process and that large companies would have trouble implementing the marketplace into their current strategies, but maybe that was a good thing. Its possible to think that the smaller broker, that have the extra time, also have the time to provide a higher level of customer service and better overall experience. Continued Popularity: 1% [?] This post, somehow disappeared. Maybe someone didn’t like it, who knows, but I will be rewriting it and will post it back up soon. Check back later. Okay, I am going to summarize the post that was here and that was subsequently erased somehow. Loss Mitigation, which includes loan modifications, short sales, bankruptcy and cash-on-sale negotiations. Today, most people are focusing on the loan modification portion of the loss mitigation strategy. In fact, more and more mortgage companies are beginning to focus on what I call the “sub-prime suite”, which includes FHA loans, debt settlement, credit repair and loan modification. Many companies are finding that if a consumer doesn’t fit into one product they can usually fit into another. This enables companies to increase their ROI by being able to cross sell offers or possible sell multiple offers to one lead. Let me focus on Loan Modifications for the rest of the post. Currently there are little to no regulations in the space. There are a few states that require the attorney to physically located in the state where the loan modification consumer is located. Other then that, at time this post is being written, there are no other regulations. I assume that will change in the next 12 months, so get in now and start making money. Getting into loan modification you have two options. The first option is to bring on the attorneys to your staff and handle the negotiations in-house. When researching this you will find that some attorneys want to stay far away from loan modifications, because they no nothing about it. Others will be excited and ready to get working. The second option is to broker the deal. This is probably the easiest way to get involved with loan modifications. You simply take the applications and pass them off to a servicing company and receive a pay out. I recommend taking a look at two companies. The first Get Green Credit which will train you on the process and assist you in getting up and running, ask for Bo Bryant. The second is Credit Advocate Alliance which will provide a complete branded portal for you as well as the servicing. They provide a branded website where the consumers can go to and pay for the service as well as a back end system that will allow you to track the process, ask for Greg Plummer If you have any further questions on leads sources or back end servicing companies, let me know. |