Attending the Five-Star Mortgage Servicing Conference

Just signed up for the Five Star Default Servicing Conference & Expo hosted next week in Fort Worth.  Primarily, I’d like to hear the chatter from within the mortgage servicing industry and learn about their processes for servicing and forecasting.

Here are a few sessions that piqued my interest:

• The Mortgage Market on Wall Street
• Steve Forbes Featured Address: America’s Housing Crisis
• Streamlining Servicing Workflow
• Freddie Mac Economic Outlook

Here’s why:

• We support a number of Wall Street firms (the big financial houses) and hedge funds that actively traded whole loan mortgage portfolios.  There’s a significant amount of information arbitrage available in the mortgage market.  This is partly due to budgets – some investment groups have deeper pockets and more sophisticated systems.  Other groups haven’t considered alternate methods to modeling the housing markets.

• The portfolios can either be an “all or nothing” (buy all of the assets within) or the buyer can the select assets from the pool to purchase. Talking with our clients, it’s interesting to hear about the various modeling techniques that are utilized to locate the final bid/ask on the underlying assets comprising these portfolios.

• The Mortgage Servicing Workflow is a topic of tremendous interest to us here at Altos Research.  We’ve developed a number of data-specific applications and forecasting tools that enable mortgage servicing companies to make faster and more accurate decisions about which borrowers to refinance, work out, or drop.  Traditionally, mortgage servicers have used credit scores and other borrower behavior ratings but have not used real-time real estate data to determine if market dynamics support a pending work out.  Even borrowers with adequate credit scores will have a higher propensity to “walk away” if their mortgage is deep enough underwater.

• It’s always interesting to hear Freddie Mac’s spin on the market.  In April, I attended SourceMedia’s Mortgage Servicing Conference and heard Ingrid Beckles provide her outlook on Freddie Mac’s plan for the housing market. As I wrote back in April, it was underwhelming.

• Steve Forbes – how many opportunities does one have to hear a billionaire speak live?

If you’re attending, send me an email (scott@altosresearch.com) or post a comment so I can look for you there.

Tagged as: foreclosures, Housing Market Forecasting, Mortgage Market, Mortgage Servicing