John Meussner's Blog

Queue the scene in Adam Sandler's "Billy Madison", when adult Billy paces back and forth waiting for the school bus singing "back to school...back to school....". After 9 years building a career and entering the corporate mortgage world with Mason-McDuffie mortgage, this week, I made the jump to ...

Every time.  EVERY TIME.  Every time the Fed cuts rates, mortgage ads fly from everyone's social media pages - "NOW IS THE TIME TO REFINANCE!!".  The phones start ringing.  "HELLO, I SAW THE FED CUT RATES, WHERE ARE RATES NOW!?". There is perhaps no more confusing moment for the general mortgage ...

IPCs and Realtor Compensation "Typical fees and/or closing costs paid by a seller in accordance with local custom, known as common & customary fees or costs, are not subject to the IPC limits..." That little slice of verbiage, part of the Fannie Mae selling guide, offers some clarity on a point o...

A Real (Estate) Disaster - Why Hiring The Wrong Agent Is A Disastrous IdeaDisclaimer:  the chain of events depicted here are via the perspective of a client, along with the coinciding dismal communication from their agent (so I never got any of the story from the buyer's agent because they were m...

Opting OutWhen talking with a client about doing a mortgage preapproval one of the first things we do in today's world is help the client "opt out" of spam to avoid getting their phones and inboxes blown up when their credit is run.For those that don't know, a "trigger lead" occurs when a hard cr...

I'm a snarky son of a....wonderful woman, my mother is a Saint.   But I can be snarky, difficult, stubborn, and sometimes mean (when I'm mean, it almost always comes from a place of humor that misses the mark).  But, when I go down that path, I try to consider what I'm adding to the world.To that...

The Fed has once again hiked the Fed funds rate, this time with a .25 hike announced today.  This brings the Fed rate to 5.5%, the highest level in 22 years, signaling tighter credit, more expensive borrowing, and more pressure on banking profitability as the Fed continues to wage war on inflatio...

5 Things Agents Can Do To Improve Communication Throughout a real estate transaction, there's a lot of communication by a lot of involved parties.  Buyer, seller, buyer's agent, seller's agent, buyer's agent's transaction coordinator, seller's agent's transaction coordinator, escrow, title, insur...

What Makes You Exceptional? This month, Margaret Rome Baltimore 410-530-2400 and I want to know what makes you exceptional?   It is estimated that in the United States alone, there are OVER 3 MILLION real estate agents, with over 1 million REALTORS.  While the number of US adults that are real es...

Support the Middle Class Borrower Protection Act of 2023 On June 23, 2023, H.R 3564, The Middle Class Borrower Protection Act of 2023, passed the US House of Representatives with bipartisan support.  But the work is NOT finished, and YOUR VOICE is needed to get this much needed legislation throug...