Housing Market 2011: A Spirited Dialogue

Rob Hahn and Jeff Corbett are partners in 7DS Associates, a strategic management consultancy focused on the real estate business. As industry insiders and observers, they agree on many aspects of the current housing market; they disagree on plenty of others. AOL Real Estate asked them to conduct a dialogue throughout this last week of the year, discussing the big real estate topics of 2011. This is Part 2 of 5.

Rob-

I used to own a mortgage brokerage in a former life. Well, I still like to read lender rate sheets, because you can tell a lot about the psyche of smart money by reading between the lines. Lenders that are selling Fannie or Freddie-backed loans are "pricing for the worse" (raising rates) on mortgages that have a Loan to Value (LTV) greater than 60 percent.