LoanMarket.net - California's Largest Marketplace for Whole Loans

Published on 2009-03-26

LoanMarket.NET: An Online Marketplace For Buying And Selling Loans
 
Published on:Thursday, March 26, 2009
 
Written by:Brad Zimmerman
 
A California web based company; LoanMarket.NET is looking to capitalize on the mortgage market in a rather interesting way, utilizing the web to transact mortgages and provide market information on loans and notes like never before.
 
For those interested in selling which can be anything or anyone from banks, private equity funds to individuals, LoanMarket.NET makes it easy to post real estate secured promissory notes and all the pertinent information via a step-by-step guide. This includes appraisals, loan documentation, deeds of trust and even proof of homeowners insurance, among other things. LoanMarket.NET secures all of the paperwork necessary for each property, to increase transparency and ease the buying and selling process.
 
LoanMarket.NET works with The First American Corporation to provide a property profile and an analysis of current market value, as well as a picture.
 
“This high level of specific information and documentation allows bidders to adequately underwrite a loan’s risk and bid toward the yield they would require in order to invest” –LoanMarket.NET 
 
Buyers must be approved by LoanMarket.NET and provide proof of the ability to close. As always with important financial decisions, LoanMarket.NET encourages buyers to consult appropriate counsel before finalizing anything.
 
In this market pools of loans are being purchased for nearly 20 percent of their original face value and being sold individually for 10-30 percent more. There is...      read full article

Published on 2009-03-09

Commentary
A Proposal For The National Asset Clearinghouse
Vince Haley and Kevin Thomas Pigott 03.09.09, 12:00 AM ET

The shrill call for the nationalization of U.S. banks has made this unfortunate outcome seem all but inevitable. In a last-ditch effort to avoid nationalization, Treasury Secretary Geithner has come forward with a plan to relieve banks of their troubled assets and keep them viable through a "public-private financing" mechanism. A competing strategy calls for placing troubled assets all in one federally sponsored bank, a so-called "bad bank," while keeping the valuable assets within the "good" private banks.

These new means of addressing the banking crisis emerged in the wake of the Treasury's abrupt change of plans last fall when it decided against using the funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to actually buy troubled assets. Instead, Paulson's Treasury Department opted to use these funds to supply fresh capital to the banks themselves, as well as making direct investments in specialty financiers and the auto companies.

This bizarre decision by Treasury netted taxpayers an expected loss of approximately $78 billion according to the U.S. Senate testimony earlier last month of Elizabeth Warren, chairperson of the TARP Congressional Oversight Board. So the feds overpaid for their interests in the banks, and they didn't overpay by a little. They overpaid by a lot.

In fact, uncertainty over the price of troubled assets is the reason why Paulson didn't use TARP funds to buy them in the first place. This led to his...      read full article

Published on 2009-02-17

Here’s the text of a letter to the WSJ from me commenting on the excellent column by Gordon Crovitz last week:

Let’s Use Technology to Help Value Toxic Assets

Perhaps the market would have preferred Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s plan announced Feb. 10 if it incorporated insight from Gordon Crovitz’s “Time to Reinvent the Web (and Save Wall Street)” (Information Age, Feb. 9). Mr. Crovitz presciently reports how a combination of structured data and Internet technology could advance Mr. Geithner’s goal to “mobilize and leverage private capital.” Mr. Crovitz describes the application of “semantic Web” technology to streamline access to information about bad debts.

A semantic industry standard computer language to make investments transparent and Internet friendly already exists. Last year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission mandated its use for disclosure about public company financials, mutual fund risk and return, and credit ratings. A crowd-sourced project by the non-profit extensible business reporting language software (XBRL) U.S. consortium produced more than 10,000 data tags for U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles at the cost of a TARP rounding error. Software already exists to detect and explain nonstandard reporting. Finalizing data tags for the relative handful of facts required to price mortgage backed securities, other asset backed securities, and their derivatives — at least standard derivatives — would be easy compared to the work required to create tags for the vast universe of GAAP.

If the troubled assets are as poor as feared, those who hold them might fear the...      read full article

Published on 2009-02-04

February 4, 2010