Santa Barbara Fire and Mortgage Woes

I just arrived home last night from a 2 week long road trip to the Pacific Northwest. That is really some very pretty country, at least when the sun is shining. We had terrific weather and enjoyed Portland, Seattle and the San Juan Islands. I recommend all those places. The topic we were hit with first was the fire which has coated Santa Barbara with a layer of ash. For updates you can view this website. In the office today the topic of conversation seems to be the turbulent mortgage business. I have heard stories of investors pulling out of the mortage business so orginators don't have anyone to sell their loans too. I had a few emails in my inbox that talked about lenders that had stopped funding loans and we should watch out for any transactions we had with them. I saw an article about a major lender that filed bankruptcy. Most recently Countrywide has purchased the retail business of Homebanc. It appears to me that we will certainly see some more consolidation and or lenders filing bankruptcy. We haven't seen it yet in our office but I would suspect borrowers are going to be putting in more than one application to different lenders to help hedge their bets. One website that follows this market moment by moment is The Mortgage Lender Implode-o-Meter.